While the far right claims artificial intelligence has become too ‘woke’, experts argue it’s not a sentient being with its own viewpoints
When Elon Musk introduced the team behind his new artificial intelligence company xAI last month, the billionaire entrepreneur took a question from the rightwing media activist Alex Lorusso. ChatGPT had begun “editorializing the truth” by giving “weird answers like that there are more than two genders”, Lorusso posited. Was that a driver behind Musk’s decision to launch xAI, he wondered.
“I do think there is significant danger in training AI to be politically correct, or in other words training AI to not say what it actually thinks is true,” Musk replied. His own company’s AI on the other hand, would be “maximally true” he had said earlier in the presentation.
It was a common refrain from Musk, one of the world’s richest people, CEO of Tesla and owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” Musk tweeted last December in a reply to Sam Altman, the OpenAI founder.
Musk’s relationship with AI is complicated. He has warned about the existential threat of AI for around a decade and recently signed an open letter airing concerns it would destroy humanity, though he has simultaneously worked to advance the technology’s development. He was an early investor and board member of OpenAI, and has said his new AI company’s goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe”.
But his critique of currently dominant AI models as “too woke”, has added to a larger rightwing rallying cry that has emerged since the boom in publicly available generative AI tools throughout this year. As billions of dollars pour into the arms race to create ever-more advanced artificial intelligence, generative AI has also become one of the latest battlefronts in the culture war, threatening to shape how the technology is operated and regulated at a critical time in its development.
To read more, click here.