Culture Wars Are Coming for ChatGPT

Accusations of anti-conservative bias echo the long-running feud over social media

On Feb. 7, Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella declared the “first day of a new race” in Silicon Valley, after announcing that his company would integrate the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT into its search engine. Tech pundits seem increasingly convinced that web searches won’t produce lists of blue links and advertisements but, instead, human-sounding responses that artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT generate.

Many people marvel at the power of this technology, but right-wing commentators are distinctly unimpressed. They’ve been dredging up examples of what they see as pernicious liberalism hard-coded into the system. For instance: Why was ChatGPT willing to praise former CNN anchor Brian Stelter but not the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro? Why did it say, with confidence, that children could be transgender, when that was an obvious affront to the right-wing campaign against trans rights? And, alarmingly (to them, anyway), why had it been programmed to avoid using the N-word?