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New York Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump's A.I. Challenge: Focus on World's Most Dangerous Weapons or Woke-ism?
When the Biden administration created an 'A.I. Safety Institute' two years ago, its charge was to act as a kind of consumer safety commission for artificial intelligence, making sure that the app on your phone would not also make it easier for a terrorist to produce a chemical or biological weapon from easily-acquired ingredients. President Trump and his aides appear animated by a different threat: 'woke' A.I. They cite the embarrassing incident last year when Google's A.I. tool Gemini, asked to show a picture of America's founding fathers, portrayed a Black rendition of George Washington and some of his fellow revolutionaries. Google shut down the tool's image generator amid some mockery, but it became a rallying call for Mr. Trump's MAGA movement and led to demands from the White House that the country's A.I. giants cleanse their code so that answers are not infused with the language of diversity and inclusion or critical race theory. So when Mr. Trump issued three executive orders on Wednesday to spur what his administration calls 'A.I. dominance,' one of them addressed what his A.I. adviser told reporters was 'political bias,' though it is not clear who — human or bot — will make that judgment. 'The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the A.I. models,' Mr. Trump said Wednesday at a summit on the subject. The weapons-of-mass-destruction concern, the administration has concluded, is well understood enough that it doesn't require similarly urgent presidential intervention. Few examples more vividly illustrate how the approach to managing perhaps the greatest technological shift in the world since the invention of the internal combustion engine or the airplane is being dealt with by a new administration. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
The Chatbot Culture Wars Are Here
For much of the last decade, America's partisan culture warriors have fought over the contested territory of social media — arguing about whether the rules on Facebook and Twitter were too strict or too lenient, whether YouTube and TikTok censored too much or too little and whether Silicon Valley tech companies were systematically silencing right-wing voices. Those battles aren't over. But a new one has already started. This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased. Conservatives have been taking aim at A.I. companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading A.I. developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech. And this month, Missouri's Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a 'new wave of censorship' by training their A.I. systems to give biased responses to questions about President Trump. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called 'woke A.I.' 'We are getting rid of woke,' he said in a speech on Wednesday. 'The American people do not want woke, Marxist lunacy in the A.I. models, and neither do other countries.' The order was announced alongside a new White House A.I. action plan that will require A.I. developers that receive federal contracts to ensure that their models' outputs are 'objective and free from top-down ideological bias.' Republicans have been complaining about A.I. bias since at least early last year, when a version of Google's Gemini A.I. system generated historically inaccurate images of the American founding fathers, depicting them as racially diverse. That incident drew the fury of online conservatives, and led to accusations that leading A.I. companies were training their models to parrot liberal ideology. Since then, top Republicans have mounted pressure campaigns to try to force A.I. companies to disclose more information about how their systems are built, and tweak their chatbots' outputs to reflect a broader set of political views. Now, with the White House's executive order, Mr. Trump and his allies are using the threat of taking away lucrative federal contracts — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were recently awarded Defense Department contracts worth as much as $200 million — to try to force A.I. companies to address their concerns. If this playbook sounds familiar, it's because it mirrors the way Republicans have gone after social media companies for years — using legal threats, hostile congressional hearings and cherry-picked examples to pressure companies into changing their policies, or removing content they don't like. Critics of this strategy call it 'jawboning,' and it was the subject of a high-profile Supreme Court case last year. In that case, Murthy v. Missouri, it was Democrats who were accused of pressuring social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to take down posts on topics such as the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud, and Republicans challenging their tactics as unconstitutional. (In a 6-to-3 decision, the court rejected the challenge, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.) Now, the parties have switched sides. Republican officials, including several Trump administration officials I spoke to who were involved in the executive order, are arguing that pressuring A.I. companies through the federal procurement process is necessary to stop A.I. developers from putting their thumbs on the scale. Is that hypocritical? Sure. But recent history suggests that working the refs this way can be effective. Meta ended its longstanding fact-checking program this year, and YouTube changed its policies in 2023 to allow more election denial content. Critics of both changes viewed them as capitulation to right-wing critics. This time around, the critics cite examples of A.I. chatbots that seemingly refuse to praise Mr. Trump, even when prompted to do so, or Chinese-made chatbots that refuse to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They believe developers are deliberately baking a left-wing worldview into their models, one that will be dangerously amplified as A.I. is integrated into fields like education and health care. There are a few problems with this argument, according to legal and tech policy experts I spoke to. The first, and most glaring, is that pressuring A.I. companies to change their chatbots' outputs may violate the First Amendment. In recent cases like Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court has upheld the rights of social media companies to enforce their own content moderation policies. And courts may reject the Trump administration's argument that it is trying to enforce a neutral standard for government contractors, rather than interfering with protected speech. 'What it seems like they're doing is saying, 'If you're producing outputs we don't like, that we call biased, we're not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,'' Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. 'That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.' There is also the problem of defining what, exactly, a 'neutral' or 'unbiased' A.I. system is. Today's A.I. chatbots are complex, probability-based systems that are trained to make predictions, not give hard-coded answers. Two ChatGPT users may see wildly different responses to the same prompts, depending on variables like their chat histories and which versions of the model they're using. And testing an A.I. system for bias isn't as simple as feeding it a list of questions about politics and seeing how it responds. Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the Trump administration's executive order would set 'a really vague standard that's going to be impossible for providers to meet.' There is also a technical problem with telling A.I. systems how to behave. Namely, they don't always listen. Just ask Elon Musk. For years, Mr. Musk has been trying to create an A.I. chatbot, Grok, that embodies his vision of a rebellious, 'anti-woke' truth seeker. But Grok's behavior has been erratic and unpredictable. At times, it adopts an edgy, far-right personality, or spouts antisemitic language in response to user prompts. (For a brief period last week, it referred to itself as 'Mecha-Hitler.') At other times, it acts like a liberal — telling users, for example, that man-made climate change is real, or that the right is responsible for more political violence than the left. Recently, Mr. Musk has lamented that A.I. systems have a liberal bias that is 'tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.' Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that 'controlling the many subtle answers that an A.I. will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.' It's not, in other words, as straightforward as telling an A.I. chatbot to be less woke. And while there are relatively simple tweaks that developers could make to their chatbots — such as changing the 'model spec,' a set of instructions given to A.I. models about how they should act — there's no guarantee that these changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want. But asking whether the Trump administration's new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether A.I. developers can actually build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point. These campaigns are designed to intimidate. And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, A.I. companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight. 'Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,' Ms. Lakier said. 'I'm surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.'
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NPR public editor claims alleged 'political bias' is actually 'geographic bias'
NPR public editor Kelly McBride argued in a recent media appearance that she thought accusations of "political bias" from President Donald Trump were just actual examples of "geographic bias." While appearing on the "1A" radio show to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to defund NPR, she heard from a caller who blamed NPR's partisan coverage for Trump's actions. "I really do lament the loss of funding for public radio, especially in, like you say, Native American communities," Florida resident Kendra said. "But the only people you have to blame for that are the people at places like NPR. The programming is terrible. It's partisan. It's hacky. It's, you know, people have been warning you guys for a very long time that you need to be more balanced in your coverage, and you have steadfastly refused." Trump Says He'd Love To Yank Funding For Npr, Pbs, Would Be 'Honored' To See It End However, another caller, Erin Timbers from Indiana, said that NPR was an example of "unbiased news" that she used for her students at a local high school. McBride accused Trump and other critics of "singling out individual stories that seem to be focused on very small communities, trans communities, minority communities, immigrants" rather than looking at NPR as a whole. Read On The Fox News App She suggested perceived bias likely came more from journalists being largely situated on the East and West Coast, claiming that NPR seeks to compensate for that. "To the extent that there is a bias, I don't think it is a political bias," McBride said. "I think it is a geographic bias, and I think that NPR has worked very hard to compensate for that. And I think it's unfair to look at, to cherry-pick small stories or individual stories, especially when you go back 10, 12, 15 years." Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture She added, "When you look at the amount of content that NPR puts out in a given week, it's something like 1,800 individual stories, individual topics. So, that really, if you're going to look at bias, you really have to look at a representative sample. And when I do that, I do not find bias the way that the president and other critics find." In a comment to Fox News Digital, White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields attacked McBride for "unabashedly" denying NPR's "flagrant bias." "NPR has a clear record of flagrant bias, so it's no surprise that its public editor would unabashedly deny this fact. The American people should not be responsible for funding Democrat propaganda, and the President is cutting the cord on the reckless abuse of taxpayer dollars. NPR will have to learn how to survive without federal subsidies," Fields said. In May, Trump signed an executive order to slash taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS after the White House accused them of spreading "radical woke propaganda." Later that month, NPR and three other Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration in federal court, calling it a violation of the Constitution and the First article source: NPR public editor claims alleged 'political bias' is actually 'geographic bias'
Fox News
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
NPR public editor claims alleged 'political bias' is actually 'geographic bias'
NPR public editor Kelly McBride argued in a recent media appearance that she thought accusations of "political bias" from President Donald Trump were just actual examples of "geographic bias." While appearing on the "1A" radio show to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to defund NPR, she heard from a caller who blamed NPR's partisan coverage for Trump's actions. "I really do lament the loss of funding for public radio, especially in, like you say, Native American communities," Florida resident Kendra said. "But the only people you have to blame for that are the people at places like NPR. The programming is terrible. It's partisan. It's hacky. It's, you know, people have been warning you guys for a very long time that you need to be more balanced in your coverage, and you have steadfastly refused." However, another caller, Erin Timbers from Indiana, said that NPR was an example of "unbiased news" that she used for her students at a local high school. McBride accused Trump and other critics of "singling out individual stories that seem to be focused on very small communities, trans communities, minority communities, immigrants" rather than looking at NPR as a whole. She suggested perceived bias likely came more from journalists being largely situated on the East and West Coast, claiming that NPR seeks to compensate for that. "To the extent that there is a bias, I don't think it is a political bias," McBride said. "I think it is a geographic bias, and I think that NPR has worked very hard to compensate for that. And I think it's unfair to look at, to cherry-pick small stories or individual stories, especially when you go back 10, 12, 15 years." She added, "When you look at the amount of content that NPR puts out in a given week, it's something like 1,800 individual stories, individual topics. So, that really, if you're going to look at bias, you really have to look at a representative sample. And when I do that, I do not find bias the way that the president and other critics find." In a comment to Fox News Digital, White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields attacked McBride for "unabashedly" denying NPR's "flagrant bias." "NPR has a clear record of flagrant bias, so it's no surprise that its public editor would unabashedly deny this fact. The American people should not be responsible for funding Democrat propaganda, and the President is cutting the cord on the reckless abuse of taxpayer dollars. NPR will have to learn how to survive without federal subsidies," Fields said. In May, Trump signed an executive order to slash taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS after the White House accused them of spreading "radical woke propaganda." Later that month, NPR and three other Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration in federal court, calling it a violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment.
Reuters
12-06-2025
- Business
- Reuters
FTC may restrict Omnicom, Interpublic over ad restrictions after their merger, NYT reports
June 12 (Reuters) - The Federal Trade Commission, reviewing ad giants Omnicom and Interpublic's proposed merger, may impose a condition that will stop the combined company from boycotting platforms because of political content, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Omnicom (OMC.N), opens new tab struck a $13.25 billion all-stock deal in December last year to buy rival Interpublic Group (IPG.N), opens new tab, thus creating the world's largest advertising agency. The restrictions the FTC is discussing are part of the Trump administration's effort to address perceived political bias in corporate America against conservative voices and causes, the report said, citing two people briefed on the matter. The U.S. regulator and the ad companies did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. The terms of the merger review between the FTC and the two ad companies were not finalized, the report added.
