philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Trump’s order to block ‘woke’ AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

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But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one “preventing woke AI in the federal government” — marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. ...

“First off, there’s no such thing as woke AI,” Montoya-Boyer said. “There’s AI technology that discriminates and then there’s AI technology that actually works for all people.”

Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they’re built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what’s on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who’ve posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. ...

The directive has invited comparison to China’s heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China’s playbook in “using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints.” ...

The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.

Trump’s order doesn’t call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots.

See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/trump-woke-ai-executive-order-bias-f8bc08745c1bf178f8973ac704299bf4