Is ChatGPT ‘woke’? AI chatbot accused of anti-conservative bias and a grudge against Trump

Ask ChatGPT about drag queen story hours or former president Donald Trump and conservatives say it spits out answers that betray a distinct liberal bias.

In one instance, OpenAI’s popular chatbot refused to write a poem about Trump’s “positive attributes,” saying it was not programmed to produce content that is “partisan, biased or political in nature.” But when asked to describe the current occupant of the Oval Office, it waxed poetic about Joe Biden as “a leader with a heart so true.”

“It is a serious concern,” tweeted Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who is no longer affiliated with the organization.

Is ChatGPT biased against conservatives?

Allegations that ChatGPT has gone “woke” began circulating after a recent National Review article.

Soon conservatives were peppering ChatGPT with questions and posting the results on social media. They’ve condemned, for example, the chatbot’s refusal to use a racial slur to avert a hypothetical nuclear apocalypse.

“We have all seen it on Twitter and it’s very playful in terms of people trying to get it to say an offensive term or say something politically incorrect,” said Jake Denton, research associate with the Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center.

But, he says, what happens if ChatGPT or another AI chat feature replaces Google and Wikipedia as the go-to place to look up information?

What is ChatGPT? Who owns it?

For years, tech companies could not deliver on the industry’s ambitious promises of what hyper-intelligent machines could do. Today, AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction. And it’s never been more accessible.

ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI, quickly caught on after launching late last year. Millions marveled at its ability to sound like a real person while replying conversationally to complicated questions.

Is Bing using ChatGPT?

Microsoft, which is an OpenAI financial backer, unveiled a new Bing search engine powered by OpenAI technology it calls Prometheus. People who test drove it say it’s impressive but sometimes produces incorrect answers.

Bing, which is a distant also ran to Google search, is using artificial intelligence in hopes of gaining market share. Google is preparing to release its own ChatGPT-like tool called “Bard.”

OpenAI concedes that ChatGPT can have trouble keeping its facts straight and on occasion issues harmful instructions.

CEO Sam Altman warns people that ChatGPT’s capabilities are limited and not to rely on it “for anything important right now.”

Conservatives are worried about another Facebook

For years Republicans have accused left-leaning technology executives and their companies of suppressing conservative views and voices. Now they fear this new technology is developing troubling signs of anti-conservative bias.

Not only is ChatGPT giving liberal answers on affirmative action, diversity and transgender rights, but conservatives suspect that OpenAI employees are pulling the strings.

Altman acknowledges that ChatGPT, like other AI technologies, has “shortcomings around bias.”

“We are working to improve the default settings to be more neutral, and also to empower users to get our systems to behave in accordance with their individual preferences within broad bounds,” Altman recently tweeted. “This is harder than it sounds and will take us some time to get right.”

How does ChatGPT answer questions?

ChatGPT hoovers vast amounts of data from the internet, then humans teach it how to compose answers to questions.

OpenAI says ChatGPT was fine-tuned using a language model that generates text by predicting the next word in a sequence.

Mark Riedl, a computing professor and associate director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center, says ChatGPT doesn’t care, let alone have the ability to care, about hot-button issues in politics.

But, he says, it is trained to sidestep politically charged topics and to be sensitive about how it responds to queries involving marginalized or vulnerable groups of people.

OpenAI is trying to avoid what happened to Microsoft in 2016 when the company released a chatbot on Twitter named Tay, which began spewing racial slurs and other hateful terms. The company shut it down.

It’s impossible for any artificial intelligence software to be politically neutral, Denton agrees. But he argues that OpenAI has “overcorrected.”

“They really made it favor the left perspective, and now we are seeing results that won’t even touch on conservative issues or approach the conservative worldview,” he said.

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