Technology And The 'Truth' - How The Culture Wars Found A New Battleground In AI

When Elon Musk introduced the team behind his new artificial intelligence company XAI last month, the billionaire entrepreneur took a question from the rightwing media activist Alex Lorusso.

- Nick Robins-Early

ChatGPT had begun "editorialising the truth" by giving "weird answers like that there are more than two genders", Lorusso posited. Was that a driver behind Musk's decision to launch XAI, he asked.

"I do think there is significant danger in training AI to be politically correct, or in other words training AI to not say what it actually thinks is true," Musk replied. He had earlier told the event that his own company's AI would be "maximally true".

It is a common refrain from Musk, the world's richest person, the CEO of Tesla, and the owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter. "The danger of training AI to be woke - in other words, lie - is deadly," he tweeted last December in a reply to Sam Altman, the OpenAI founder.

Musk's relationship with AI is complicated. He has warned about the existential threat it poses for approximately a decade, and recently signed an open letter airing concerns it would destroy humanity, though he has simultaneously worked to advance the technology's development. He was an early investor and board member of OpenAI, and has said XAI's goal is "to understand the true nature of the universe".

But his criticism of currently dominant AI models as "too woke" has added to a larger rightwing rallying cry that has emerged amid the boom in publicly available generative AI tools that began with the launch of ChatGPT last November. As billions of dollars pour into the arms race to create ever more advanced artificial intelligence, generative AI has also become one of the latest battlefronts in the culture war, threatening to shape how the technology is operated and regulated at a critical time in its development.