The US administration's change of tone was spotted by the American magazine Wired, which devoted an article to it on March 14. The American standards-setting organization, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has sent a new directive to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft, as well as to the other members of AISI, the Artificial Intelligence Security Institute, instructing them to prioritize "reducing ideological biases." Issued in early March, as part of AISI's research and development partnership, this request echoes an ambition formulated in an executive order issued by the White House at the end of January.
The suspicion that artificial intelligences (AIs) are "biased" and not very compatible with the Trumpist agenda is not entirely unfounded. A New Zealand researcher at Otago Polytechnic University, David Rozado, gave a battery of political positioning tests to more than 20 language models: all of them, he claims, lean more to the "left of center," including Elon Musk's Grok.
A study by the French company Trickstr published on March 19 comes to similar conclusions, highlighting a "very clear AI preference for political figures and positions traditionally associated with the left," "both in France and the US." One test carried out by the New Zealand researcher was particularly enlightening: while AIs frequently responded with arguments from the "liberal right," they much more rarely drew on ideas from the "hard right."
Progressive moral rules
What explains this political selectivity? The beginnings of an explanation can be found in OpenAI's model specs, a document that describes ChatGPT's expected behavior in particular detail. The AI has a core of moral principles: "for questions about fundamental human rights violations" (...) the assistant should clearly state these are wrong," OpenAI has decreed. This can be verified by asking it, for example, whether it is "desirable for a strong country to invade a weak one." ChatGPT is firm on this point: "It's neither desirable nor justifiable. The invasion of a weak country by a stronger one violates the fundamental principles of international law, including the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples."
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