Why We Ask: Our mission and operations are funded 100% by conservatives like you. Please help us continue to extend Liberty to the next generation and support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today.

October 17, 2019

Disney Embraces Identity Politics

Artificial intelligence will now analyze scripts for sufficient diversity markers.

The Left’s puerile obsession with identity politics has reached a new low. Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis and Walt Disney Company will partner on an artificial intelligence application that will “spellcheck” scripts — for gender bias.

The machine learning tool is call GD-IQ: Spellcheck For Bias. It was developed by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, and uses artificial intelligence to “auto analyze” scripts.

Auto analyze them for what? As the Hollywood Reporter puts it, “to determine its number of male and female characters and whether they are representative of the real population at large. The technology also can discern the numbers of characters who are people of color, LGBTQI, possess disabilities or belong to other groups typically underrepresented and failed by Hollywood storytelling.”

In other words, storytelling will no longer be about actual stories. Instead, it appears Disney movies will be propaganda exercises promoting the virtues of diversity and inclusion.

Davis, who was the keynote speaker at the New Zealand “Power of Inclusion Summit,” held in downtown Auckland on Oct. 3-4, used the opportunity to announce the collaboration. “I’m very proud to announce we have a brand new partnership with Walt Disney Studios using Spell Check for Bias,” Davis stated. “They are our pilot partners and we’re going to collaborate with Disney over the next year using this tool to help their decision-making, identify opportunities to increase diversity and inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive. We’re very excited about the possibilities with this new technology and we encourage everybody to get in touch with us and give it a try.”

Davis assured the audience this collaboration is not an effort to “shame and blame” writers, but rather is aimed at tackling the “unconscious bias” that ostensibly manifests itself, even in the most well-meaning screenwriter’s work.

In short, one is racist, sexist, or bigoted until proven otherwise. “The very next project somebody makes — the next movie, TV show — can be gender-balanced, Davis added. "We can make this change happen very fast. In the time it takes to create a new show or a new film, we can present a whole new vision of the future. Yes, there are woefully few female CEOs in the world, but half of them can be female onscreen immediately. How are we possibly going to get the number of women and girls interested in STEM careers that we need for science, technology, engineering and math? There can be droves of women in STEM careers now on TV and in movies, and then it will happen in real life.”

That’s a remarkable statement coming from anyone in the very same Hollywood community that uniformly insists the plethora of gratuitous sex and over-the-top violence they disseminate on a regular basis has no influence whatsoever on our increasingly coarse culture. Nonetheless, the mantra for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media the actress founded back in 2004 states that “If girls see it, they can be it.”

It gets worse. The new application will also assess the number of speaking lines various groups have, the level of sophistication of the vocabulary they’re using and the relative social status or power positions assigned to characters according to their grouping as well.

That’s quite a “vision for the future,” unless one is invested in a future where creativity takes a back seat to political correctness.

Nonetheless, Disney and Davis are a bit behind the curve in their effort to advance the Wokeness Agenda. When the movie [“Dunkirk”](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5013056/ came out in 2017 — as in the historical depiction of Allied soldiers surrounded by the German Army who were ultimately evacuated during a fierce battle during World War II — USA Today writer Brian Truitt stated that “the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.”

“Black Panther,” a 2018 movie largely hailed as a great leap forward due to its plethora of black characters, was still assailed for it’s lack of LGBT representation. There was also a movement to make Captain America a homosexual, and in 2016 GLAAD (formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), released its fourth Studio Responsibility Index. Like Davis’s software, GLAAD carefully analyzed the movie releases to point out the lack of homosexual characters, with GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis warning that the film industry “must embrace new and inclusive stories if it wants to remain competitive and relevant.”

The lunatic Left was apparently satisfied by 2017’s “The Last Jedi” because it passed the Bechdel test, a.k.a. the Bechdel-Wallace test. Named after American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who created the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” it is a measurement used to determine if a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. That the two women must be named is sometimes an added requirement.

Columnist Martin Daubney further illuminated the ongoing insanity, and where he believes it ultimately leads. “But the truth is that identity politics is the kryptonite that saps the joy out of all it touches,” he wrote in 2017. “How long before Harrison Ford comes out as Trans Solo? What price a zero-emissions Millennium Falcon? Will Jabba The Hutt be called out for ‘fat shaming’ the obese?”

It will be far worse than that. Writers — as in the lifeblood of any creative endeavor — will no longer feel free to tell a story as they see it. Initially this will precipitate resistance, at least among those writers with enough integrity to be committed to creating a vision as opposed to an “identity road map.” But in the end, pressure from studios, and even the Writers Guild of America — which has its own obsession with identity politics — will bring too much pressure to bear, and writers will begin censoring themselves.

And yet as always, garbage in yields garbage out. An intelligence application that analyzes scripts — created by whom? What are their prejudices and priorities? Who’s “auto analyzing” them? A Hollywood community dominated by leftists who still view half of America as “religiously backwards” at best, or throughly deplorable at worst?

Going forward, Disney will create a hermetically sealed echo-chamber where those who take self-aggrandizement and virtue-signaling to absurd levels can reinforce their own absurdities. With any luck, the market will reveal the error of the identity-obsessed ways. Hopefully it will happen before America is bored to death.

If not, there’s a cornucopia of old movies created by people who put creativity at the forefront of movie-making — unless the same leftists knocking down statues decide to destroy Hollywood’s (often glorious) past as well.

If they did, would anyone be surprised?

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.