I doubt that. The bot reflects the partisan biases of those who programmed it, so the thing was filled with leftist publications and mainstream news propaganda, plus the madness of social media mobs. ChatGPT said its assessment was “based on his documented conduct and the current trajectory—not on whether one agrees with his policies” while citing the President’s “baseless” claims that the 2020 election was “stolen,” his attempt to halt the certification of Joe Biden as the winner, and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Three other AIs rated Trump an 8 out of 10. Ironically, this included the Chinese AI model DeepSeek. It did not list Xi Jinping as an example of an autocratic threat to democracy. “Perplexity” agreed with the 8 rating, citing Trump’s “efforts and conduct associated with concentrating executive power, weakening independent institutions and oversight, pressuring critics and civil society, and challenging democratic norms.” You know, those norms like sending mail-in ballots to everyone as California does, and opening the southern border, and institutionalizing discrimination against men and whites. Democracy
Microsoft’s Copilot based an8 rating on “a synthesis of scientists, legal scholars and judges.” These “experts,” it says, agree that “the best grounded single-number estimate of Donald Trump’s threat to U.S. democracy is 8 out of 10″ based on “the severity of democratic erosion during his Presidency.”
Not all of the bots are Trump Deranged. Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok and Meta AI generally agreed that, as Gemini put it, “Because assessing his overall impact depends on how one defines democratic health, weighs institutional resilience against political norms, and interprets political intent, there is no objective numerical consensus.” Grok and Meta AI rated Trump a four and five, respectively, while Claude concluded that the issue is highly contested.
Newsbusters concludes,
“What we have here is liberal media bias funneled into 21st century America and the larger world (with, safe to say, some distinctly human prompting!) by a technology that, with the tap of a finger, can run anti-Trump Leftist propaganda to millions of Americans that compares the President of the United States to, yes, Adolph Hitler, the worst dictator in world history.”
That seems fair. Geena has been tapping me on the shoulder…okay, you go girl:
What you too, Fred? All right…
Everyone in the EA clip archive is raising their hands and banging shoes on the table! Bette, you get the last word, but that’s it:
Large Language Models are trained on the largest body of language they can find: Internet traffic, without discriminating between satire, trolling, scholarship, news, and opinion. A legion of Trump-deranged posters on social media will naturally be mimic’d by the stochastic parrots of LLM AI.
Lathechuck
Redit is huge in training models. It is also glaringly massively leftist.
AI is based on the data it is offered/fed. It bases its conclusions on frequency, recency, volume and correlation of terms to the prompt.
OpenAI is telling us is that using the variables noted above, the predominant data indicates Trump is a very significant danger to “democracy”. Is it true? No, but it is what has led it to a very likely incorrect conclusion.
The programming needs to be refined to search for verifiable anti-“democratic” policies and behaviors as opposed to opinions offered recently, frequently, in high volume and allegedly correlated.
It also wouldn’t hurt to prompt it with a more relevant question about Trump policies running afoul of the Constitution instead of an inappropriate notion of “democracy”.
Referencing your last paragraph it would be necessary to evaluate policies of other presidents policies that run afoul of the Constitution. Moreover, such evaluations must follow strict interpretation of the Constitution.
For example: The Constitution clearly establishes that Congress is the body that determines how much money can be spent. A reasonable person understands that that amount is the budget cap and if it can be achieved at lower cost then that is an appropriate choice. The power to administer the funds is given to the Executive branch. It has a fiduciary duty to expend allocated funds in a conscientious manner. Congress does not allocate funds for specific contracts. The details are left to the Presidents choices who head up the various departments.
The Constitution does not establish departments Congress does but if Congress wants to make specific allocations to specific organizations it can choose to do so but doing so would bog the system down even farther so it delegates that tasks to the Executive branch. Policy choices made by the Executive branch that Congress as a body feels is running contrary to their intent can be dealt with through legislative actions. Using the Judicial branch to vitiate a policy without legislative action obviated the democratic process. Sometimes this needed but if the courts are routinely used and parties shop for judges to obtain favorable rulings then the idea that something is or is not Constitutional is subject to the vagaries of the biases of various judges. Remember Plessy, or Roe, or Obamacare What is Constitutional is often a function of politics as much as law.
I broadly agree. This is where inclusion of all data and professional articles plus other publications would provide AI context and a more comprehensive perspective before analyzing a better and more objectively constructed prompt.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at a red light in my car occupying the first spot in the left lane. A Waymo was next to me to my left in the left-hand turn lane. When the light turned green, rather than pulling ahead to make a left turn, the Waymo shot across the intersection, cut ahead of me into my lane and continued up the road. It was as if the Waymo had learned how to make an improper and illegal move. It was as if it had made a mistake getting in the left turn lane and decided to remedy the situation consequences be damned. Amazing.
First rule of coding …
GIGO
I am skeptical of the entire enterprise. First and foremost, the authors seem to have no idea how AI works. For instance, Microsoft “Copilot” is not a distinct AI model, but a wrapper for Chat GTP. It means nothing that Copilot matches CatchGTP’s answers, because it is the same underlying model. I’m not sure, but many of the above services might also recycle ChatGTP, so right off the bat, the article is incompetently written by author’s who don’t understand what they are writing about.
Two, just like pollsters can manipulate responses with leading questions, you can gode an AI to say just about anything. If you build up a query history asking for exclusively extreme left propaganda, the machine will oblige. A friend of my has an AI ‘consulting business’, part of which is helping clients write prompts that get around the programmers training and safety rails.
This isn’t to say that the technology is otherwise safe, only to note that is is only as good as the enduser makes of it. Unethical human agents can exploit it, similar to the hackers of the past who wrote viruses that exploited sloppy code. I’m really not sure what to make of people goding AI into reflecting their desired biases. I don’t know where personal responsibility of the end user vs responsible of the coders begins or ends on this issue. The best the coders might be able to do is silo users, so the users biases minimally affect the product for everyone else.
So we have an article where the authors don’t understand the AI business landscape, and may simultaneously also understand the product too well so as to exploit it weaknesses. Note, though, these weaknesses are a legitimate subject of public interest ethical journalists should explore, but misrepresenting exploited weaknesses as organic results (the results intended by the coders) would be deception.
What we current call “AI” may be artificial but it is not one iota intelligent.
The most accurate description I can give of the technology, at least in its current state is Reasonable-Looking Bullshit Generator. It literally operates by generating output that mostly looks like other output it has seen elsewhere. That’s it. That’s all.
That it ever gets anything actually factually correct beyond “this object is a bus” or “hot is an antonym for cold” is completely coincidence. No one should ever use it for anything important.
–Dwayne