AI, being fully automated, amplify the effects.

Human run media has been around for a while, and I think people have definitely seen issues with certain biases more and more. This flavor of AI is relatively new, so now we see an issue with bias there as well.

It seems really simple, am I missing your point?

Because you have a large number of media outlets. There's at least one media outlet for every relatively big ideology or demographic. And these biases are well understood by people.

With LLMs, you'll probably end up only having 2 or 3 companies, and it wouldn't be surprising if they all end up having silicon valley, left leaning biases.

You can tune Fox news, but you can't use a "right wing chat gpt".

> You can tune Fox news, but you can't use a "right wing chat gpt".

You can build your own with the GPT API. I started playing with it and it returned racial slurs in response to innocuous prompts like "hello" and "ok". Seems perfectly tuned out of the box for the kind of speech that the right is interested in these days.

Can you share your prompts for reproducibility?

IIRC "hello" and "ok" were the literal prompts, calling the API with the example code.

Actually, you know that's a fascinating point. I'd love to see if 10,000 people were asked whether one of these statements in isolation was "hateful" whether we'd see similar, stronger, or weaker biases.

Because people who are in power use the AI to justify their continuing tyranny by trying to imply that "well, the AI agrees with me and it is a billion times more intelligent than you and I are, so shut up". It's just used as a justification to further tyrannize anyone who disagrees with whatever the AI comes up with, but is deferred to as some kind of superlative super-reliable "objective" expert.

That's just a strawman. Who did that?

It happened throughout the history of the Soviet Union. It was the whole premise of central planning. Now, they think they can "do it better" because they'll use AI instead of "expert people" but it will have the same horrifying effects. Same thing happened in Maoist China.

... and something like that never happened in the rest of the world, only in Soviet Union and China?

If the government is tyrannical, they don't need an AI as an excuse. Lacking AI they can, and did, use the science, experts, god, devil, and a whole plethora of excuses since the dawn of the humans. Why would AI change anything there?

I agree with you. I'm just saying that is how it is used by tyrannical people. It's a misdirection and a way for them to justify themselves. They can deny responsibility when things go bad because they were "trusting the expert AI model" and when things go well, they praise themselves for being wise enough to listen to the "expert AI model".

> If the government is tyrannical, they don't need an AI as an excuse.

Only in the fairytale tyrannies that exist in the heads of Western nationalists. Real tyrannies rest on the labor of a large cadre professionals and managers, and constantly have to justify themselves or risk being overthrown. "AI," or any credential for that matter, has the purpose of isolating the decision from the decision makers. It's tyranny-laundering; tyranny in the passive voice.

I replied once, but I'll share another example that's happening right now. Climate change models are being deferred to as some kind of reliable expert about the future, and all kinds of tyrannical laws and controls are being put in place because "the experts" and "the advanced supercomputer models" say Bad Things are going to happen.

But I'm sure that now I've triggered your cognitive dissonance and you will see me as an insane person.

> Climate change models are being deferred to as some kind of reliable expert about the future

No, the Experts who wrote the model are being deferred to as some kind of reliable expert. Because... they are exactly that.

You can make the argument that the models or the experts are wrong, but you're not providing any sort of argument for that.

I've spent most of my life deferring to the calendar to know when it will get cold for winter. It's obviously reasonable to defer to some systems. We are in fact quite capable of predicting all sorts of future events!

Your first sentence will be the same sentence used to justify the AI models that will be used by the government to impose other tyrannical laws in other areas of your life besides climate change. And they will wash their hands of responsibility by saying "we trusted the best models at the time made by the best experts!"

But the whole thing is just misdirection for their tyrannical desires. It's already working on you and you are wondering how it will ever work. Which is why I mentioned cognitive dissonance.

Conflating a chaotic system (which is, by definition, unpredictable) with the regularity of a calendar seems a bit disingenuous.

Redlining and credit scoring has and in some cases still does systematically implement discriminatory practices via algorithmic means. And arguing with a loan officer isn't going to get you anywhere. The put your details in the black box, and whatever the black box says is implicitly trusted.

From the article:

> This technology will have an enormous amount of power to shape human perceptions and manipulate human behavior. Therefore, they can be misused for societal control, spread of misinformation and discrimination of demographic groups.

That's what media already does.

AI scales human intention. Or at least that’s the goal. The threat (of a lopsided Internet) we’ve already been seeing and experiencing is going to be scaled up.