499
Google AI gets cagey when asked who won the 2020 elections: But the AI responses get more forthright when asked outside the US. (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
83 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [S] 135 points 1 week ago (13 children)

Apparently Google AI Mode can tell you who won the 2020 US election, but only if you ask from another country. In America, Biden’s victory is apparently classified as a dangerous opinion. Incredible achievement: building a machine that knows the answer and has been trained to pretend it doesn’t.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 13 child comments
    •
  • [–] 79 points 1 week ago (10 children)

    Which is why they want everybody dependent upon AI to do their thinking for them. They can simply rewrite history once and that's all anybody who doesn't know any better will ever know. This shit needs to be banned except for narrowly defined uses like programming where there's virtually nothing political involved.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
    •
  • [–] 32 points 1 week ago (8 children)

    I think more and more that computing is inherently political.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    Don't agree. Computing is no more inherently political than a knife is inherently a murder weapon. It's a tool, and can be used for many things, including political use (or misuse, nowadays).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Outside of the actual political process, is there anything that do you consider inherently political?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Considering that politics is about the exchange of ideas between people so a society can be governed (by whatever system applies) and laws can be enacted to make that government functional, I would consider political basically the political process itself, laws, philosophy, maybe history (which informs the other ones and usually has some inherent biases), maybe literature (the same) and a few other disciplines. Mostly things that are by nature subjective and can't be measured in an objective way (like math, or engineering in general can).

    That doesn't mean that the latter can't be "contamined" by politics, especially the disciplines which are a mixed bag of objectivity and subjectivity, like architecture or the economical sciences. But that's why the key word here is "inherently": those disciplines are not inherently political, they've been co-opted by interest groups precisely because of that subjectivity.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago*

    It seems like we're just getting stuck on the word 'inherent'. If you prefer, I submit that everything is contaminated by politics, and anything newly created is also quickly contaminated by pervasive political interests and pressures, if not created largely as a consequence of political processes already in motion.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    This is just called good government relations. You don't want acting heads of state to be mad at you. Google does this for everything. Borders and names on their maps change depending on who's asking. Maybe it shouldn't be like that, and maybe it's disappointing that the US apparently requires coddling like this, but it is what it is.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I just tried it from the US and it told me unequivocally that Joe Biden won.

    However it didn’t automatically show the “AI mode” result when I searched. It sometimes does and other times doesn’t, depending on the search. But when I tapped “AI mode” I got a straight answer. Not even a mention of fraud allegations.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent