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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Nick Robins-Early

‘Very wonderful, very toxic’: how AI became the culture war’s new frontier

Safeguards in place on AI models are there to protect from hate speech, disinformation and propaganda.
Safeguards in place on AI models are there to protect from hate speech, disinformation and propaganda. Illustration: Mark Harris/The Guardian

When Elon Musk introduced the team behind his new artificial intelligence company xAI last month, the billionaire entrepreneur took a question from the rightwing media activist Alex Lorusso. ChatGPT had begun “editorializing the truth” by giving “weird answers like that there are more than two genders”, Lorusso posited. Was that a driver behind Musk’s decision to launch xAI, he wondered.

“I do think there is significant danger in training AI to be politically correct, or in other words training AI to not say what it actually thinks is true,” Musk replied. His own company’s AI on the other hand, would be “maximally true” he had said earlier in the presentation.

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