Keep Calm and Generate Slogans
If you’ve been on Twitter today you will have seen a lot of people getting angry about a range of t-shirts on Amazon with slogans like “KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT” (or a lot of people sucking up to Justin Bieber and keeping Harry Styles up to speed with the feline obituaries — it rather depends which parts of Twitter you frequent).
It eventually became obvious that the shirts are printed on demand from a catalogue of thousands, generated automatically by combining every common verb short enough to fit with a handful of stock prepositions, pronouns and adverbs (THEM, A LOT, NOT, IN, US, ME, HER, OFF, OUT, ON, and IT) so there was no reason to be upset after all and everyone could just calm down which (spoiler alert) they didn’t. I am a firm believer that if you have been offended by a computer then either that computer has passed the Turing test or you have failed it. There are only two ways a computer can swear at you: either it was programmed to swear at you, or it wasn’t programmed not to — if your number plate spells out ‘bums’, the only sane response is amusement.
Computers control huge amounts of stuff these days so we’re starting to see fun, and sometimes scary, glitches more and more in real life. There are whole TV channels run with almost no human involvement. Even if error-free code existed it would doubtless have some edge case or subsequent hack that nobody considered that will make it unthinkingly do something stupid. Computer programs play the stock market very well until something slightly odd happens, whereupon they very efficiently wreck the economy before anyone can turn them off. There are products on Amazon priced by similarly cunning algorithms, which you’d never notice until they point only at each other, and the prices spiral out of control with no reference to any reality but the one they created. It generates dumb signs that proudly promote infinitesimal discounts, error boxes informing you that there has not been an error, and that time I saw MTV ask viewers to text the same code to vote for two different songs, then get all surprised when it was a dead heat. The programme crashed, and the channel was plunged into silent darkness.
If you understand how software thinks, this is all very obvious and a bit amusing. If you’re thinking sure, but there’s a simple and obvious fix, you’re right: just program the systems to play random music after thirty seconds of ‘dead air’. If you didn’t understand the term “edge case” earlier, it refers to something unusual but potentially important that could make your simple and obvious fix go crazy and offend people, such as Remembrance Sunday.
But I think another part of the issue is that people have the idea that computer-run enterprises are the preserve of large, rich corporations. Maybe because traditionally only a large corporation could afford that much processing power, or only large corporations could act so unthinkingly. But nowadays you can get enough computing power to automatically and unwittingly offend an entire gender for $25. If you’re willing to put in a little time, learn a couple of APIs and write a Python script, I bet you can have your own headless company up and running in a week or so, and it will provide you with a tiny trickle of money as long as your broadband stays up. Nobody will ever buy 99% of your products, and the rest will sell maybe a couple, but that’s still enough to turn a profit if you never spent anything in the first place. There are hosts of blogs out there set up on free platforms by computers, posting content nicked from other sites by computers, and plastered in adverts. They cost nothing to run and very occasionally make a few cents, but that’s enough to justify doing it. You can buy automatically generated books, printed on demand from Wikipedia, or any other text some guy’s computer can find.
I would bet good money that Solid Gold Bomb, the company actually selling the shirts, is one or two guys operating out of a bedroom. But much of the outrage has made demands like “mandatory training for all staff on domestic violence, workplace harrassment, and general decentcy; donation/corporate volunteering commitment to a suitable charity”, which only make sense for a pretty large organisation. But they must be big, right? Their stuff is on Amazon! That’s like, official! (That, and, Solid Gold Bomb’s apology blamed “a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff” which if I’m right is very disingenuous but also a bit funny.)
I’ve found the response to all this generally very interesting. How people react to subtly different moral dilemmas usually is, and in this case we have quite a nice one: I do not believe that anyone would be offended if Solid Gold Bomb simply had a text box you could type anything you want into and receive a t-shirt with those words on it, in Gill Sans with a picture of a crown. As it is, Amazon was designed for normal shops full of products that actually exist, and so quite reasonably require a pre-populated list of those products. SGB kludged this latter system into the former, by working through every conceivable phrase, generating a picture, and submitting the whole lot. Suddenly, people are upset that the list includes certain things — even though the ‘list’ is really little more than two dictionaries multiplied by each other, cached as an artefact of the kludge. That distinction, I think, is fascinating.
Partly that’s simply because when the list is there and you can look at it, it’s not obvious what’s happened — especially if you just saw a tweet with a link to the worst thing on it. But the distinction appears to be quite robust to finding out. The attitude has been, ironically, Stay Mad And Carry On. One commenter on the blog I just linked to insisted that this incident betrayed a “cultural sense of entitlement”, without offering any evidence to counter Hanlon or Occam’s respective razors.
So determined are some to stay mad that they refuse to believe that the thousands of near-identical shirts are computer-generated at all. They look for inconsistencies in the truth and find them whether or not they exist, just like they do with inconvenient clinical trials and the moon landing videos. And while some combinations (eg, “KEEP CALM AND RAPE HER”) are notably missing, and “HIM” isn’t even in the list of possible endings, most of the inconsistencies arise from a misunderstanding of how the shirts are generated and/or an inability to search Amazon properly.
Some who do accept the facts have put forward excuses to stay mad at Amazon. Some have suggested that human oversight should have prevented it. Those people have fundamentally misunderstood the Algorithmically Generated Tat industry: if even a small cost is incurred making products available then it won’t work, for the same reason that you don’t get anything like so many advance-fee scams through the mail when you have to actually buy stamps. The sort of person who thinks “I hope none of these generated strings are misogynistic; I’d better check” does not sell products generated at random. They open Etsy or CafePress stores with carefully-drawn designs. And someone with less scruples takes their place in the Generated Tat marketplace.
Others have argued that there should have been a software filter. I can only assume those people have not thought it through. OK, so in retrospect anything with “RAPE” in it was probably asking for trouble, but ‘rape’ is unlikely to be included in any list of obscenities so it’s easy to see how it would slip through. It’s particularly tricky given the richness of the English language — “Keep calm and fuck me” is boorish and dumb, but “Keep calm and fuck us” might be a political message of solidarity with the 99%. Sure, “fuck” was always going to be a problem word, but this is how most common verbs work in English when you carelessly bolt pronouns onto them — “KEEP CALM AND JUMP IN” is a happy-go-lucky kind of slogan, but “KEEP CALM AND JUMP HER” is all rapey again. Nobody can filter all eight thousand combinations under these conditions. Computers can’t and humans cost too much (and still mostly can’t). And if you filter out the offensive shirts, you probably also lose any that might have sold anything — nobody is likely to buy the “KEEP CALM AND SKI HER” shirts, are they?
But the most revealing excuse put forward to stay mad is that look, they have “KEEP CALM AND HIT HER” shirts too. This seemed to do the rounds a little while after the original “RAPE” version of the scandal, raising the possibility that a previous version of the same scandal is why “KEEP CALM AND RAPE HER” isn’t available and now we’re working our way through all the other combinations of words in descending order of offensiveness. I find it hard to believe that anyone would happen upon such offensive combinations by accident, so either they’re typing offensive words into a search box and then getting all prissy because the computer obliged them, or they’re actually looking for a “KEEP CALM AND RAPE HER” shirt, in which case there is nothing you or Amazon can do to stop them making one themselves. That is simply the world we live in now — although “the world where anyone can make their own t-shirt” is not a new world. You can make an offensive t-shirt with a bin bag and a marker pen if you’re suitably determined. I am forced to conclude that at least 50% of this outrage, and probably the whole lot, was generated deliberately by someone who knew perfectly well what was happening and chose to stoke up some fire.
And the real winners? I bet somebody bought a t-shirt today.