Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers have AI ‘censorship’ in their crosshairs

US President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, who are now advising him on technology and other issues.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, this staff of technologists is well suited to the need for rapid development and adoption of artificial intelligence in the United States. Tech.

Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers could turn AI chatbot responses into a new battleground to fight conservatives’ ongoing culture war with tech companies.

AI censorship is a term used to describe how tech companies put their thumb on the scales with the responses of AI chatbots in order to conform to a certain policy or push themselves. Others may call it content moderation, which often refers to the same thing but has a very different meaning. Just like social media and search algorithms, getting the right AI responses to live news events and controversial topics is an ever-moving target.

Over the past decade, conservatives have repeatedly criticized Big Tech for bowing to government pressure and censoring social media platforms and services. However, some tech executives have begun adjusting their positions in public. For example, on the eve of the 2024 elections, the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg He apologized to Congress For bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to aggressively moderate content related to COVID-19. Shortly thereafter, the Meta CEO said his company had made a “20-year political mistake” by taking too much responsibility for problems beyond its control. he would not make these mistakes again.

But according to Trump’s tech advisers, AI chatbots are a bigger threat to free speech and potentially a more powerful way to control speech. Instead of directing a search or feed algorithm to any result, like downing vaccine misinformation, tech companies can now give you a single, clear answer that doesn’t include it.

In recent months, Musk, Andreessen and Sacks have spoken out against AI censorship in podcasts, interviews and social media posts. While we don’t know how they advised Trump, their publicly stated beliefs may reveal the conversations they had behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. and Mar-a-Lago.

“That’s my belief and what I’m trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you think social media censorship is bad, (AI) has the potential to be a thousand times worse,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen told a final interview With Joe Rogan. “If you wanted to create the ultimate dystopian world, you would have a world where everything is controlled by an artificial intelligence programmed to lie,” Andreessen wrote in another paper. Recent interview with Bari Weiss.

Andreessen also revealed to Weiss that he has spent about half of his time on Trump’s team since the election, advising on technology and business.

“(Andreessen) explained the dystopian path we’re on with AI,” said David Sacks, former PayPal COO and co-founder of Craft Ventures. Type in X shortly after he has been appointed as Trump’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar. “But the timeline has split and we’re on a different path now.”

On All In — the popular podcast Sacks co-hosts with other influential venture capitalists — Trump’s new AI adviser has repeatedly criticized Google and OpenAI for pushing AI chatbots to be politically correct, as the show’s hosts described it.

“One of the concerns about ChatGPT was that it was programmed to wake up and not give people the right answers about a lot of things. Answers were being censored,” Sacks said An episode of All In from November 2023.

Despite Sacks’ claims, even Elon Musk admits that xAI’s chatbots are often more politically correct because he wants. This is not because Grok is “programmed to wake up”, but rather the reality of AI training on the open internet. However, Sacks is making it clearer every day that “AI truth” is something he’s focused on.

“This Is How You Google Black George Washington”

The most cited case of AI censorship was when Google Gemini’s AI image generator was created multiracial pictures for polls Like “founding fathers of the United States” and “German soldiers in World War II” were obviously inaccurate.

But there are other examples of companies that influence specific results. Recent users have discovered this ChatGPT simply won’t answer questions about specific namesand OpenAI has admitted that at least one of those names has launched internal privacy tools. At another point, Google and Microsoft’s AI chatbots refused to say who they were He won the 2020 US election. During the 2024 election, almost every AI system refused to answer questions about the election results. Except for Perplexity and Grok.

For some of these examples, technology companies have claimed that they are making safe and responsible choices for their users. In some cases this may be true – Grok Hallucinations about the results of the 2024 elections happened even before the votes were counted.

But the Gemini incident came up; This led to Google disabling Gemini’s ability to create images of people — something the free version of Gemini still can’t do. Google called this incident a bug and apologized for “missing the mark”.

Andreessen and Sacks don’t see it that way. Both venture capitalists said Google didn’t miss the mark at all, but hit the mark a little too clearly. They saw it as a major camouflage moment for Google.

“The people running Google AI smuggle in their own preferences and biases, and those biases are extremely liberal,” Sacks said. An episode of All In A response to the Gemini event from February 2024. “Do I think they will get rid of prejudice?” No, they will make it more subtle. I think this is what worries me.”

“It’s 100% intentional; That’s how you get Black George Washington on Google,” Andreessen said A recent interview with WeissIt repeats the case of Gemini. “This goes directly to Elon’s argument, which is that you should train an AI to lie (ie give answers like Gemini’s).”

As Andreessen notes, Elon Musk has spoken out against “awakened AI chatbots.” Musk originally created the well-funded AI startup in 2023 to counter OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which the billionaire said at the time. Infected with the “Virus of the Awakened Mind”. Finally, he created Grok, an AI chatbot with less security than other leading chatbots.

“I’m going to start something you call TruthGPT, or maximum truth-seeking artificial intelligence that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said. In an interview with Fox From 2023.

When Musk launched Grok, Sacks applauded the effort: “Having something like Grok around will — at the very least — keep OpenAI honest and ChatGPT honest,” Trump’s AI czar said. All In series from November 2023.

Now Musk is doing more than just keeping ChatGPT honest. He has Raised more than $12 billion to fund xAI and competes with OpenAI. He is also suing Sam Altman’s startup and Microsoft. potentially halting OpenAI’s for-profit transition.

Musk’s influence on conservative government officials has already shown its weight in other areas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating a group of advertisers X. Musk, who allegedly boycotted Elon Musk, previously sued the same advertising group, and since then some companies restored the ad on its platform.

It’s unclear what Trump and other Republicans might do if they really want to investigate OpenAI or Google for AI censorship. It could be investigations by expert agencies, legal challenges, or maybe just a cultural thing that Trump can continue to do for the next four years. Regardless of the path forward, Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers are tight-lipped on the matter today.

“Elon has done a privatized version of what should be happening widely now with Twitter files,” Andreessen said Weissreferring to Musk’s allegations of censorship on Twitter. “We, the American people, need to learn what’s been going on all this time, especially government pressure mixed with censorship… There should be consequences.”