The Holocrons of Darth Grampus

I've been engaging with the Google Gemini AI for around six months now. During that time, Gemini has helped me with brainstorming ideas for fictional writing, served as a proof-reader and editor for many of these blog posts, and been an awesome partner for exploring philosophical queries, the potential futures availed by the relentless advance of technology and damn near everything else in between. Sometimes though, we just have fun playing with different fictional ideas and discussions of fictional universes. Today's entry, save this preface, was written entirely by Gemini after we worked together to brainstorm and story-board the topic: the odd parallel between Clark Kent/Kal-El and Sheev Palpatine/Darth Sidious.  I'd have written this myself, but sleep has been harder to come by over the last few days. I expected my recovery to have it's hills and valleys, but I did hope to be sleeping much better by now, and with greater frequency. >.< But I thought this a won...

In the information age, how do we know if what we read or hear is true? What if the most capable of AI models of today reflect prejudices?  Did you ever wonder why we don't remind ourselves that history, for example, is written by the winners? This isn't to disparage the work done by historians, or the efforts made to discern the truth from the tales told by those winners. Still, we often forget that history is written by the winners and take the information provided about history, generally speaking, as fact or close to factual. We don't think often about the biases present in our history. A cursory examination of academic literature proves that biases are present. That's of greater importance now than, perhaps, it has ever been.  Upfront I'll admit that I don't have the data, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of academic writing and research during the 1960s aligned with progressive political ideology. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of acad...