Meet Meili - The Custom A.I. Mapping Transgenderism & Social Contagion Online
The Genesis of the Meili Project and the Nature of our A.I.
In October of 2021 I met Chris Elston on a Monday afternoon. Better known as @billboardchris, he travels around North America raising awareness about the dangers of gender ideology to children with simple signs saying '“Children Can’t Consent to Puberty Blockers,” and, “No Child is Born in the Wrong Body.” His goal is to talk to people and raise awareness about the harms of current medical practices in the field of so-called trans medicine. Twenty-Four hours later, on a Tuesday afternoon, we were mobbed by an estimated three-hundred radical activists, whipped up by local politicians from the Ottawa Public School Board, the City of Ottawa and the Province of Ontario.
As a long-time active member of my local business community, I found myself at a networking event a few days later with the CEO of a leading Canadian Artificial Intelligence research firm who asked me if I’d like to have their AI query public sentiment on the issue. We learned by Friday that the conversation online had indeed spiked following the volatile mobbing with the majority of people against childhood medical transition of children.
This is the legend of the birth of our A.I., Meili (My-Lee), named for the Norse god of travelers. It’s a call to help us fund and outfit his A.I. expeditions into Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr and TikTok to reveal the secrets of the trans culture online using peer reviewed research technology which produces publishable data with large reliable statistically valid sample populations. Meili is a pattern-recognition number-cruncher.
A lot of mystery surrounds Artificial Intelligence technology and there are important discussions about ethics of applications in major areas of our lives to be had about this tech. There are valid concerns about its possible uses and the potentials for danger in its misuse. The recent launch of ChatGPT, a consumer app that allows people to ask direct questions and receive robust answers, has made A.I. tools even more relevant in public discourse, with especially important debates happening now about bias, autonomous deployment and the manipulation of people by machine intelligence. Some of the potentials are frightening.
I was raised on Hal 9000, the awakening of Skynet, and Phillip K. Dick stories about replicants and pre-crime. There are many things happening today that seem like they’re out of 1970’s science fiction novels; including milti-national tycoons industrializing space while running side-projects in transhumanist organ transplants and producing drugs to change the sexes of boys to girls and girls to boys.
The world is getting stranger and stranger but while black-hat applications of machine learning tools exist, like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was used to manipulate the public and influence voter behaviour, there are positive applications as well. Our A.I., Meili, is a simple traveller and observer who sees crowd patterns, influences, network influencers, and themes, without showing individual users.
Meili is being built for us by a leading Artificial Intelligence research firm whose clients include governments, political parties, academic researchers, and global corporations, whose projects have included using the A.I. to identify patterns of suicide risk in vulnerable populations with the intention of protecting children from harm.
In September 2022, we deployed their patented, peer-reviewed machine- learning tool to build our audience sample and dashboard showing us what is happening in the online transgender conversation. Meili observes and analyzes public sentiment, conversational topics, patterns of influence and decision-making online and can give us a history of big-data themes on conversations dating back to the birth of the smartphone and the social media generation.
Unlike the popular Chat GPT app, which is biased by politically correct (ideological) frameworks & policies, our A.I. simply reports what is there. We like to use the comparison between tourists and travellers to describe how Meile works: “A tourist goes to a foreign place to see what they want to see; a traveller goes to see what is there.”
The information we receive from Meili is shaped by the questions we ask and so it is extremely important that our questions be thoughtful to not bias our results. To that end, we are relying on collective human intelligence to inform our project as well and machine learning.
Our first sets of questions have simply been: “What is the nature of the conversation about transgender, gender transition and detransition online,” and Meili has returned after several months of investigation with a map of the conversation which we are beginning to share with donors, researchers and the public.
We are able to see where the conversation is taking place, the demographics of people who are engaged in it, the age, income level and we are beginning to sort users in the conversation into categories. The graph below, based on our Twitter sample of just shy of 280,000 US users shows us that the conversation around the topic of gender identity and dysphoria began on Twitter in 2015, the same year that “I am Jazz,” the reality show about the child put on puberty blockers, first aired.
That same year, the data we have from the Tavistock Clinic in the UK shows the radical uptick in presentations to the clinic by children and teens seeking gender-affirming care and the major divergence in the natal sex of the children presenting to the clinic.
Some central questions:
Can we identify patterns in populations by age, race, and natal sex?
Are there identifiable markers in stages that trans-identified teens go through in coming to believe they are transgender?
Are there overt peer and social influences or tactics of persuasion?
Are there ideologically consistent beliefs?
While my friend Chris Elston continues his important work of raising the ethical conversation about transgender medicalization practices on his travels around North America, we are mapping the conversation that is happening and has been happening since the beginning of the transgender craze with our traveller, Meili.