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President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sachs — who now advise him on technology and other issues.
When it comes to AI, this crew of technologists are more or less in agreement on the need for rapid development and adoption of AI across the United States. However, there is one AI safety issue that this group has raised frequently: the threat of AI “censorship” from major corporations. Technology.
Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers could make AI chatbot responses a new battleground for conservatives to fight their ongoing culture war with tech companies.
AI oversight is a term used to describe how technology companies put their thumb on the scale with the answers of their AI-powered chatbots in order to comply with certain policies, or push their own policies. Others might call it “content moderation,” which often refers to the same thing but has a completely different connotation. As with social media and search algorithms, getting the right AI answers to live news events and controversial topics is a constantly moving target.
Over the past decade, conservatives have repeatedly criticized big tech companies for caving in to government pressure and censoring their social media platforms and services. However, some tech executives have begun to soften their stances in public. For example, before the 2024 election, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg He apologized to Congress Due to bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to heavily moderate content related to COVID-19. Shortly after, Meta’s CEO said he made a “20-year political mistake” by taking too much responsibility for problems that were beyond his company’s control — and said he wouldn’t make those mistakes again.
But according to Trump’s technical advisers, AI-powered chatbots represent a greater threat to free speech, and perhaps a more powerful way to influence control over speech. Instead of skewing a search or feed algorithm toward a desired outcome, such as downgrading vaccine misinformation, tech companies can now give you one clear answer that doesn’t include it.
In recent months, Musk, Andreessen, and Sachs have spoken out against AI censorship in podcasts, interviews, and social media posts. Although we don’t know exactly how they advise Trump, their publicly stated beliefs could reveal the conversations they’re having behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago.
“That’s my belief, and what I’ve been trying to say to people in Washington, is that if you thought social media censorship was bad, it (AI) was probably a thousand times worse,” a16z co-founder Mark said. Andreessen in A The last interview With Joe Rogan. “If you wanted to create a dystopian world, you would have a world where everything is controlled by artificial intelligence that has been programmed to lie,” Andreessen said in another article. Recent interview with Barry Weiss.
Andreessen also revealed to Vice that he has spent nearly half his time with the Trump team since the election, providing advice on technology and business.
“[Andreessen]explained the miserable path we were on with AI,” David Sachs, former co-founder and chief operating officer of PayPal and Craft Ventures, said in a recent article. Share on X Shortly after he was appointed to be Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency official. “But the timeline split, and now we’re on a different path.”
On All In — the popular podcast show Sacks hosts alongside other influential venture capitalists — Trump’s new AI advisor has repeatedly criticized Google and OpenAI, as the show’s hosts described it, for forcing AI-based chatbots to be politically correct .
“One concern about ChatGPT early on was that it was programmed to be woke, and that it wasn’t giving people honest answers about a lot of things. It had censorship built into the answers,” Saxon said. An episode of All In from November 2023.
Despite Sachs’s claims, even Elon Musk admits that xAI’s chatbot is often more than that. Politically correct From what he wants. This isn’t because your puppy was “programmed to be woken up”, but more likely the fact that the AI is being trained on the open internet. However, Sachs makes it clear every day that “AI honesty” is something he focuses on.
“This is how you get black George Washington on Google”
The most cited case of AI censorship was when Google’s AI image generator Gemini generated multiracial images for queries such as “Founding Fathers of the United States” and “German soldiers in World War II,” which were clearly inaccurate.
But there are other examples of companies influencing specific outcomes. Recently, users discovered that ChatGPT would not answer questions about certain names, and OpenAI admitted that at least one of those names triggered internal privacy tools. At another point, Google and Microsoft’s AI chatbots refused to identify who He won the 2020 US elections. During the 2024 election, almost every AI system refused to answer questions about the election results, with the exception of Perplexity and Grok.
For some of these examples, technology companies have argued that they are making a safe and responsible choice for their users. In some cases, this may be true – your puppy was hallucinating about the outcome of the 2024 election before the votes were counted.
But the Gemini incident remained. It caused Google to turn off Gemini’s ability to create photos of people — something the free version of Gemini still can’t do. Google referred to this incident as a mistake and apologized for “missing the mark.”
Andreessen and Sachs don’t see it that way. Both venture capitalists said Google didn’t miss the mark at all, but rather hit it very clearly. They saw it as a pivotal hiding moment for Google.
“The people who run the AI at Google are smuggling in their preferences and biases, and those biases are very liberal,” Sachs said. An episode of the program All In From February 2024 in response to the Gemini incident. “Do I think they’ll get rid of the bias? No, they’ll make it more accurate. That’s what I think is worrying about it.”
“It’s 100 percent intentional; that’s how you get Black George Washington on Google,” Andreessen said. Final interview with Weissparaphrasing the Gemini incident. “This goes directly to Elon’s argument, which is that at the core of this, you have to train the AI to lie (i.e. produce answers like Gemini’s).”
As Andreessen mentioned, Elon Musk has been vocal against “AI chatbots.” Musk originally created his well-funded AI startup, xAI, in 2023 to oppose OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which the billionaire said at the time Infected with the “Awakened Mind Virus”. Ultimately, he created Grok, an AI chatbot that has significantly fewer safeguards than other leading chatbots.
Starting in 2023, Musk said in an interview with Fox: “I’m going to start something that you call TruthGPT, or artificial intelligence that seeks the truth and tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
When Musk launched Grok, Sachs praised the effort: “Having something like Grok will at least keep OpenAI honest and will keep ChatGPT honest,” the Trump administration’s AI czar said in a speech. All in an episode from November 2023.
Now, Musk is doing more than just keeping ChatGPT honest. It has raised more than $12 billion to fund xAI and compete with OpenAI. He’s also filing a lawsuit against Sam Altman’s startup and Microsoft, which could halt OpenAI’s for-profit transformation.
Musk’s influence on conservative government officials has already shown that it carries weight in other areas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating a group of advertisers who allegedly boycotted Elon Musk’s Company X. Musk previously sued the same ad group, and since then, some companies have Advertisement has been resumed On his platform.
It’s not clear what Trump and other Republicans would do if they actually wanted to investigate OpenAI or Google for AI censorship. It could be investigations by specialized agencies, legal challenges, or perhaps just a cultural issue that Trump can push over the next four years. Regardless of the path forward, Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers are not mincing words on the issue today.
“Elon, using the Twitter files, has released a privatized version of what should happen now on a massive scale,” Andreessen said. To WeissIn reference to Musk’s allegations about censorship on Twitter. “We, the American people, need to know what has been going on all this time, specifically regarding this tangle of government pressure and oversight… There must be consequences.”
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