Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written a bit about the troubling left-wing biases encoded into the widely discussed new AI technology ChatGPT. The new chatbot is happy to pen long, in-depth stories regarding any number of popular progressive fantasies — that Hillary Clinton won the presidential election, for example, or that Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 bid for Georgia governor because of voter suppression. But it refuses to indulge the right-wing alternatives, citing the danger of “misinformation.” At the same time, the AI has standard left-wing views on transgender ideology, the question of drag-queen story hour’s appropriateness for children, and a variety of other ongoing culture-war debates.
My pointing this out has invited a fair amount of scoffs and eye-rolls from online progressives. These critics have posited that I was “either manipulating the system somehow or making fake screenshots”; that the AI’s bias was a silly thing to focus on; that “reality has a liberal bias”; that the conservative premises I was entering were just “hate speech,” which should be anathema to a company that “is working hard to establish trust with the public and policy makers”; or that, as Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan Robinson argued, “it’s not that ChatGPT is left-wing, it’s that you are wrong.” In essence, the bias doesn’t exist, and/or who cares if it does, and/or it exists and it’s good, actually.
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