Didn't anyone at the Home Office ever read Mary Shelley or H G Wells?
The origins of the character are ironic, to say they least. An early iteration of Amelia began life in a counter-extremism video game funded by the UK Home Office and created to deter young people aged 13-18 from being attracted to far right extremism in Yorkshire.
Why would they be? What's been happening in Yorkshire, I wonder?
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a simple multiple choice format game with basic animation. Its players are taken on a journey as characters at a college. They are invited to make decisions in scenarios including whether or download potentially extremist content or join an Amelia character on a rally organised by “a small political group” protesting against changes in society and the “erosion in British values”.
You released a virtuesignalling hectoring game, one that you really should have known would be subverted by gamers post-Gamergate...
Certain choices result in a referral under the British government’s Prevent counter-terrorism programme.
And of course, that's exactly what happened!
However, it is a subversion of the Amelia character that has exploded across social media channels in a way that has astonished even the creators of the original game. Among the plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations are a Manga-style Amelia, a Wallace and Gromit version and AI-generated “real life” encounters between her and the characters of Father Ted or Harry Potter, accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging.
We live in ....interesting times, don't we?
3 comments:
The AI memes do NOT subvert Amelia. They portray Amelia with wexactly the same convictions as the one in the game, who states the objective truths which are so anathematic to the bien pensane but obvious to anybody with eyes and a brain. Amelia's great sin is noticing. It is noticing that get you referred to prevent.
Rhoda K
Of course the Grauniad describes "Amelia's" words as racist and far-right, that would be their default setting for anything they don't like. I only found out about this Amelia situation very recently, and not only is the workmanship of the counter product top-notch, but it's simply fucking hilarious to boot!
Where this issue gets me furious though is that I have two boys in exactly the age range the original Home Office "education tool" was aimed at, 11 to 18. I may have to (very carefully) ask them if they have been exposed to this garbage in school, because I don't trust any professional educators these days to be transparent about what goes on behind their doors. They will send email, texts, permission slips for absolutely everything, except the things they want to keep away from us pesky parents.
It should also be shouted from the rooftops that this Home Office "tool" was clearly aimed exclusively at young white Anglo-Saxons, particularly males, and until they produce a comparable system for steering young ethnic men away from killing white people or raping their females then the Home Office needs to STFU.
Steven
The whole Amelia thing is hilarious. Starting with the production of the game by people with a complete lack of foresight as to what might happen, to the huge number of very clever and funny memes, to the dilemma of the msm on how/if to report on her without consequently producing a Streisand effect and not realising that she is already everywhere. It remains to be seen what Amelia's life expectancy is, but she speaks many languages and has travelled all over the world, so hopefully she will not be going away anytime soon.
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