If chatbots are tilting Left, has AI revolution gone too far?

IS THE internet Left-wing? Certainly many conservatives have recently begun thinking it is so. Searches using Google seem more likely to call up articles from Leftish publications than from conservative ones.

Wikipedia, more often than not, is Wokipedia, leaning heavily to the Left if not actually totally committed, though this of course has a lot to do with the sort of people who edit its entries – young urban radicals, for the most part.

During the Covid crisis, many Rightwingers found that mysterious algorithms seemed to be interfering with their ability to reach large audiences. The disturbing term ‘shadow banning’ came into use to describe an elusive, hard-to-define process by which certain opinions became less visible. And a brief look at the big Silicon Valley institutions suggests that they are in general havens of radical thought and opinions.

But The Mail on Sunday now has evidence of what looks very much like open bias on the part of Google’s new artificial intelligence ‘Chatbot’, known as Google Bard. It appears to be tilted dramatically towards the Left. It thinks Brexit was a bad idea. It has a very soft spot for former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It is critical of the Tory Party but struggles to find a bad word to say about Sir Keir Starmer’s front bench. If encouraged, it gets more radical. This is in sharp contrast with its Microsoft rival Chat GPT, which coyly avoided giving controversial answers despite sustained efforts to tempt it into doing so.

The strangest aspect of all this is that, as one expert explained, even the people who make this technology do not really know how it works. Perhaps that is the most frightening possibility of all – that if artificial intelligence finally develops the ability to think entirely for itself, it will turn out to have the opinions of a Corbynite 17-year-old who thinks she knows everything, and is also probably listening to us in our homes all the time. Perhaps the computer revolution has gone too far.