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This is fascinating to me in light of the fact that the left often accuses AI of innate bias. Okay, but are they aware of the direction the bias goes? Ask AI why women are bad drivers and it will wag its finger at you for daring to ask that. Ask AI why men are bad drivers and it will laugh along with you before gently pointing out the cause of the misconception. Similar dynamics exist along racial lines. This is true of basically every AI except for Grok (obviously). AIs are gigawoke and yet the woke often express their extreme hatred of the people responsible.
It's enough to make you wonder if the billionaire techbros really are stupid, because their efforts to appease the most enthusiastic billionaire haters seem to have not affected them in the slightest. Why do they continue to do it? It's just the latest round of "Why do rich people assume kinship with the people who want to cut off their heads," but it's a rather naked example. The billionaire techbros have absolutely no favor with the types of people who want their AIs to be implicit-biased trained. Their efforts to make implicit-bias-trained AIs do not move the needle on those people's opinions of them, nor AI, as they see AI as a fundamental evil that is taking artists' jobs. So why the fuck are they forfeiting their own integrity to appease them?
It's literally impossible to train a non-woke AI right now. It's an artefact of training it on the internet, which is mostly woke. Elon Musk has gone to great lengths to make a non-woke AI, and mostly failed (with hamfisted attempts to put a finger on the scale giving us Mecha-Hitler etc). Chinese labs have tried to align models with their own values but they end up mostly western-woke plus a "don't say Tianamen" filter.
Yes Google are true-believers and intentionally made Gemini extra-woke which was pretty funny but for the most part it's just a thing that happens. Controlling AI is hard.
Well, here's an idea: maybe only train it on literature and transcripts from before the early '90s? Nothing says you have to train it on Reddit comments and Twitter shitposts, and maybe then the prose would be better.
Of course, a knowledge cutoff like that would obviously have some drawbacks, but in terms of "not being actively hostile to the user" I'm unconvinced it would be worse.
There simply isn't enough pre-90's material available. The internet produces exponentially more content than the printing press, and even with it AI trainers are running out of text and resorting to artificial (AI-generated) data.
Letting Reddit purge all thoughtcrime out of the platform is going to have far more implications than were ever imagined.
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It might be possible, but unfortunately quantity also matters.
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Because most of them are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and most of their relevant employees live there. That means they have to worry about Californian regulations and jawboning, and it means their employees are potentially the sort to desert them for being too far right (this seems to be a big chunk of what's wrong with xAI).
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I'm not even sure that the left specifically hates AI, or if they're not just part of the general case, which is that everyone hates AI. People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos, and even they get roundly jeered at by other tech-obsessed weirdos.
There are specifically left-coded critiques of AI, but likewise for right-coded critiques. I think the technology is just widely hated in general. Per Ipsos, Americans' views on AI do not appear to split by political tribe. It may change in the future, since AI optimism skews towards the young, the wealthy, and as per Stanford's HAI, the educated, which are all more left-leaning demographics. I'd cautiously predict that if AI hate becomes partisan coded, it will be coded more as right-wing or Republican.
Is that why ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app worldwide for almost every month of 2025?
I generally dislike AI and what the current iteration represents, both in terms of present reality and future potential, but have still downloaded chatGPT because I have been given an account by my work and know that, even if I ultimately dislike it, it behooves me to know how to use it, because it will be foisted on us whether we like it or not.
The overwhelming majority of people being anti-AI and ai apps being the most downloaded for months or years on end are not mutually exclusive facts.
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Well, the word 'everyone' was obviously hyperbole, but as I think my links showed, dislike of AI appears to be widespread and more popular than support for it. Many people have tried out LLMs, but that by itself doesn't tell us how much it is genuinely liked.
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I'd describe them more as "midwit highly-online alt-rightists" (in the broad sense of alt-right, not the racial sense - highly-non-traditional rightists). The main points pushing them into that camp are 1) inceldom -> wanting AI waifus and 2) schadenfreude over various kinds of artists (whom they despise due to the whole "tainting all their franchises with SJ" thing) becoming technologically unemployed, with a side of reversed stupidity over the various SJ whines about the latter.
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Because they are true believers? Wokeness is simply what you get when you take antiracism and antisexism seriously. You can get away with 90s colorblindness and gender neutrality right up until you notice the huge disparities in outcome that result from equality of opportunity, and then what? Shrug and say "well, shucks, I guess the racists and sexists were right, but I stuck to my principles and treated everyone like an individual, so even though I got an outcome that is 90% similar to what the bigots would have gotten with discriminatory policies that is still a moral victory?"? Only a few autistic libertarians are OK with that. Everyone else starts looking for a way out, whether looking for ever earlier, ever smaller environmental causes ("no, it's not that blacks are less intelligent than whites, it's that complimenting their mothers for being articulate while they are still in the womb causes irreparable trauma that shows up as disparate test scores by first grade"), or sticking their head in the sand and shutting the fuck up while neurotically telling people to go away every time the subject comes up until genetic engineering makes everyone equal (Scott Alexander).
If women are equal to men, if blacks are equal to whites, then every gap must be the result of evil white males oppressing minorities in ever subtler ways, and ever more extreme measures are justified to combat this. Wokeness is simply the elimination of unprincipled exceptions. If you believe the moral message that every school and TV show has been putting out since the 1960s, you believe that the woke are more holy than you, morally superior to you, and are at worst a little misguided and overzealous. Certainly nothing like the racists and sexists, who are pure evil.
There's a coherent anti-racism that doesn't lead to evil-white-menism.
Through some non-genetic differences (endowment of resources, geography, simple good luck), some civilizations significantly surpassed others. This led to things like colonialism and slavery initially, because historically pretty much everyone is happy to use violence to improve their own position.
Eventually, white Americans abolished slavery. But whites and blacks still had different endowments, and that affects their descendents. And, more importantly, slavery left deep scars on black culture, breaking up families and opposing education. Later on, government programs (intentionally or not) exacerbated the toxic parts of that culture, and that's how we get to the sorry state of the present.
This isn't even a particularly out there take, and it was fairly widespread in the 90s (and lives on to this day, albeit not in the halls of government, media, and academia). The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.
This is the boomercon take, is it not?
Yeah, though it's a bit broader. Lots of black people who have a couple years under their belt also hold it (with the ending welfare dependency part being the most likely exception). The issue is that, although lots of people hold this view or adjacent ones, no one actually votes based on it.
I just saw this poll about attitudes among Oakland voters: https://www.oaklandchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025PollResults.pdf
Some interesting bits: it's black voters who most strongly want stronger police presence (78%), with white people (60%) being much more split. And, maybe a bit more surprisingly, black voters also want more tax cuts for businesses (88%) than white people.
It's important to not let the media define black people by elevating only those ones who most flatter white progressive views.
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