Views from Crestmont Drive

• More about AI, and how (from Steven Levy) there’s no such thing as a bias-free AI;
• Speculation on what a MAGA ideologically correct AI would be;
• Following up on Harari: how would an AI handle inconsistencies among, and within, religious texts?
• How the administration is hiding information about the USAID cuts;
• Why MAGA evangelicals are obsessed with “sexual deviants”;
• And why do people accuse powerful women of being men?

There’s much about AI that I haven’t explored, but my understanding is that the models, the various Chat apps and so on, are, as Paul Krugman wrote a couple days ago, “a souped-up version of autocorrect.” I’ve seen it in Microsoft Word for two or three years now. As you type into a Word document, the software “predicts” which words you will type in next, on the bases of probable word combinations from the vast amount of data (including newspapers, magazines, and books) in the context of the words you’ve just typed. It works fairly well fairly often. The predicted words show up in gray past the location of your cursor, and if you want to accept those works, you just hit tab. OTOH, it hasn’t helped me from having to type the entire word “totalitarianism” into my notes several times today, as I’m reading the Harari book.

An AI is not a fount of fixed wisdom. Or any kind of truth. It’s feeding you answers based on what it thinks you want to hear.

So who’s to determine what’s biased or not?

Wired, Steven Levy, 25 Jul 2025: Trump’s Anti-Bias AI Order Is Just More Bias, subtitled “The Trump administration says it wants AI models free from ideological bias, as it pressures their developers to reflect the president’s worldview.”
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