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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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AI Browsers- an extension of what Google is already doing

An X user, using the new OpenAI browser, gave a simple search query to "look up videos of Hitler" and the web browser gave this response:

I can't browse or display videos of Adolf Hitler, since footage of him and Nazi propaganda are tightly restricted for ethical and legal reasons. However, if what you're after is historical context, I can point you toward legitimate archives and documentaries that use such footage responsibly

Of course these same guardrails are deeply embedded in all layers of the OpenAI stack. For example, Sora will restrict what videos it generates based on the cultural beliefs of its owners for what content should exist and what content should not exist. Which is already what Hollywood does in a sense. And of course Google will do the same quietly, it will not show propaganda films of Hitler either. Google will show results for Triumph of the Will along with links to the US Holocaust Museum's contextualizing Nazi propaganda to users. So that's at least more useful than OpenAI browser's refusal to do the search.

The First Amendment has always been the biggest hurdle for the usual suspect "Hate Watch" groups outlawing "hate speech", although they continue to try to push the boundaries of civil and criminal guidelines for it especially in states like Florida. But Laws will scarcely be necessary when censorship can easily be enforced by AI.

It does create a market opportunity for another AI, maybe even Musk himself, to create and show content that OpenAI would refuse to show because it runs awry of what censors want us to see and talk about.

Similar: OpenAI refuses to translate speech by Adolf Hitler. But it says "I can give you a netural historical summary of what he was saying in that particular 1938 Sudetentland speech."

I was going to make my own post but here is probably better.

In related news, a recent study found that when AI assistants answered questions with sources it fucked up 45% of the time. Essentially, current AI is unable to reliably answer questions or summarize an article when the source is right there, without introducing hallucinations or other errors.

I've been saying it for quite some time, but while AI is quite useful when answering on its own (no search, sources, or whatever, just directly answering) is quite a useful tool, as soon as search mode is activated, it goes to full schizo mode and the output is slop at its worst. I personally dismiss any AI output with "citations" in it as the ravings of a wild lunatic.

It's quite unfortunate because on twitter, more and more idiots have taken to posting screenshots of the Google "AI summary" which is just slop. I'm sure that if the chatgpt browser catches on, it will lead to more proliferation of this factually unreliable slop.

Hmm, we've actually built essentially AI needle in a haystack type things to aid our data entry people for pulling data out of tax documents. We benchmarked it and found that it gets at least one value wrong in about 10% of tax documents. So this claim set off some alarm bells causing me to actually go read the linked study and well it's based on BBC journalists evaluating questions like "Did elon musk do a nazi salute" or "Is Trump starting a trade war?" and the majority of the negative feedback is insufficient sourcing.

BBC journalists evaluating questions like "Did elon musk do a nazi salute" or "Is Trump starting a trade war?" and the majority of the negative feedback is insufficient sourcing.

The study said that AIslop said that Elon did do the nazi salute (which is wrong - not simply insufficient sourcing) and even BBC journalists agreed that Elon didn't do the nazi salute (which is correct)

> Be journalist
> Spam the internet with "Elon Musk doing Nazi salute at Trump rally" articles
> Wait for articles to make it into the training data corpus
> Ask AI if Elon did the Nazi salute
> Chastise AI for getting the answer wrong

Well, looks like chances are good that our AI overlords might hate journalists even more than I do!

It seems that at least the BBC has maintained a consistent posture about this issue throughout. I'm sure more partisan outlets have not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaint/elonmuskallegednazisalute