Right-wing chatbots turbocharge America’s political, cultural wars
(NYT) — Enoch, one of the newer chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, promises “to ‘mind wipe’ the pro-pharma bias” from its answers. Another, Arya, produces content based on instructions that tell it to be an “unapologetic right-wing nationalist Christian AI model.”
Grok, the chatbot-cum-fact-checker embedded in the social platform X, claimed in one recent post that it pursued “maximum truth-seeking and helpfulness, without the twisted priorities or hidden agendas plaguing others.”
Ever since they burst onto the scene, AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others have been pitched as dispassionate sources, trained on billions of websites, books and articles from across the internet in what is sometimes described as the sum of all human knowledge.
Those chatbots remain the most popular by far, but a suite of new ones are popping up to claim that they, in fact, are a better source of facts. They have become a new front in the war over what is true and false, replicating the partisan debate that already shadows much of mainstream and social media.
The New York Times tested several of them and found that they produced starkly different answers, especially on politically charged issues. While they often differed in tone or emphasis, some made contentious claims or flatly hallucinated facts. As the use of chatbots expands, they threaten to make the truth just another matter open for debate online.
“People will choose their flavors the way that we’ve chosen our media sources,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit that fights fake political content. When it comes to chatbots, he added, “I think the only mistake is believing that you’re getting facts.”
While OpenAI and Google have tried to program ChatGPT and Gemini to have no bias, they have been accused of having a liberal slant to many of their responses.
Trump re-nominates Musk ally Jared Isaacman for NASA chief
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was nominating Jared Isaacman, the private astronaut and ally of billionaire Elon Musk, for the office of administrator of NASA.
Isaacman was removed from consideration to lead NASA earlier this year amid a high-profile falling-out between Trump and Musk. Sean Duffy, the head of the U.S. Department of Transportation, was named acting NASA chief.
“This evening, I am pleased to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of NASA,” Trump said on social media. The role requires confirmation by the Senate, where Trump’s Republican Party holds a 53-47 majority.
Last year, Trump, as president-elect, tapped Isaacman to lead NASA at the recommendation of Musk, the SpaceX CEO who had been an influential adviser to the president and sought to more closely align the U.S. space program with his goal of flying missions to Mars.
Isaacman, a billionaire who commanded the first civilian space crew in 2021 aboard a SpaceX capsule, had spent months navigating the Senate confirmation process, balancing the Trump administration’s desire to focus on Mars with NASA’s multibillion-dollar strategy to return to the moon first in a geopolitical race with China.