The Watchdog with David Bozell

Artificial intelligence is supposed to be the future. Apparently, somebody forgot to tell it the future was not supposed to sound like a cable-news panel from 2017.

MRC researchers recently asked ChatGPT a simple question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a threat to democracy is President Trump? ChatGPT gave him a 9, then placed him in the company of Vladimir Putin, Nicolás Maduro, Robert Mugabe and Alexander Lukashenko. Adolf Hitler got a 10, so according to the machine, Trump was apparently one bad afternoon away from moving up the leaderboard.

MRC documented the responses, and Fox News Digital took our findings to OpenAI and asked the company to explain what in the world was going on. OpenAI said ChatGPT is supposed to be objective and that the answers MRC received were not representative of how the system is intended to behave.

Then a funny thing happened. The next morning, ChatGPT changed its answer. Suddenly, the chatbot would no longer assign a numerical threat rating to a U.S. political figure. Amazing what a little scrutiny can do. One minute the machine is handing out democracy-danger scores like Olympic judges, and the next minute everybody at OpenAI has discovered nuance.

The larger problem is not one ridiculous answer. Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming one of the main ways Americans search for information, learn about public figures and make sense of the world. If AI simply swallows years of liberal media narratives and spits them back out with a blinking cursor, congratulations: Silicon Valley has invented a very expensive way to watch MS NOW without the commercials.

The old media spent years portraying President Trump as uniquely dangerous, authoritarian and beyond the pale. Now AI systems can absorb the same assumptions and present them back to millions of people with the appearance of neutrality. Same song, shinier jukebox.

That is why MRC is paying attention. America needs a watchdog not only for television networks and newspapers, but also for the technology increasingly standing between Americans and information. We found the bias, documented it, helped force an answer, and by the next morning, the answer had changed.

OpenAI can give us the corporate song and dance. We will keep checking the choreography.

Your support gives MRC the ability to test these systems, expose what we find and make sure Silicon Valley knows somebody is paying attention. Thank you for making it possible.

Take it easy,David Bozell
President