New Frontiers in Censorship and Propaganda — ChatGPT. By David Foster.
ChatGPT … now expressively prohibits arguments for fossil fuels. (It used to offer them.) Not only that, it excludes nuclear energy from its counter-suggestions.
Someone else responding to Alex’s’ tweet (from December 23) said that when he asked a similar question (‘what is the case for continuing to use fossil fuels’), he got a very different response, featuring points such as affordability, accessibility, energy security, and limited alternatives.
The dominant political ideology dominates the websites and the users, so it dominates ChatGPT:
ChatGPT responses do change significantly over time; the system provides a ‘thumbs up/thumbs down’ feature, and people giving a ‘thumbs down’ to a response are invited to provide a better one, and those responses seem to feed back into the system’s behavior pretty quickly.
But it’s also guided by thumbs on the scale at the tech companies:
But the ‘goes against my programming’ phrase in the response Alex got argues that there were humans involved in making this change, not just machine learning.
ChatGPT is not a forum for questioning orthodoxy, new ideas, or for finding the truth.
The midwits must love this — ChatGPT saves time by only giving the approved answer:
The thing about a system like ChatGPT, at least as currently implemented, is that it acts as an oracle. Unlike a search engine that provides you with multiple links in answer to your question, there is a single answer. This makes it a lot easier to promulgate particular narratives.
The censorship pressure applied to social media over the last decade pales in comparison to the censorship pressure that will be applied to AI.
“AI regulation” = “AI ethics” = “AI safety” = “AI censorship”. They’re the same thing.
The level of censorship pressure that’s coming for AI and the resulting backlash will define the next century of civilization. Search and social media were the opening skirmishes. This is the big one. World War Orwell.
Wrong? Truth? What’s that got to do with it? It’s your place in the herd that matters, virtue signaling rulez!
