Why do AI bots always lean Left?

Karl D. Stephan

September 13, 2024 13 Reactions

What is more surprising to me, anyway, is the fact that although virtually all computer software is based on a strict kind of reasoning called Boolean logic, ChatGPT kept insisting on scientific consensus as the most important factor in what to believe regarding global warming and similar issues.

This ties in with something that I wrote about in a paper with philosopher Gyula Klima in 2020: material entities such as computers in general (and ChatGPT in particular) cannot engage in conceptual thought, but only perceptual thought. Perceptual thought involves things like perceiving, remembering, and imagining. Machines can perceive (pattern-recognise) things, they can store them in memory and retrieve them, and they can even combine pieces of them in novel ways, as computer-generated "art" demonstrates.

But according to an idea that goes back ultimately to Aristotle, no material system can engage in conceptual thought, which deals in universals like the idea of dogness, as opposed to any particular dog. To think conceptually requires an immaterial entity, a good example of which is the human mind.

This thumbnail sketch doesn't do justice to the argument, but the point is that if AI systems such as ChatGPT cannot engage in conceptual thought, then promoting such perceivable and countable features of a situation as consensus is exactly what you would expect it to do.

Conflated concepts

Doing abstract formal logic consciously, as opposed to performing it because your circuits were designed by humans to do so, seems to be something that ChatGPT may not come up with on its own. Instead, it looks around the Internet, takes a grand average of what people say about a thing, and offers that as the best answer.

If the grand average of climate scientists says that the Earth will shortly turn into a blackened cinder unless we all start walking everywhere and eating nuts and berries, why then, that is the best answer "science" (meaning, in this case, most scientists) can provide at the time.

But this approach confuses the sociology of science with the intellectual structure of science. Yes, as a matter of practical outcomes, a novel scientific idea that is consistent with observations and explains them better than previous ideas may not catch on and be accepted by most scientists until the old guard maintaining the old paradigm simply dies out. As Max Planck allegedly said, "Science progresses one funeral at a time."

But in retrospect, the abstract universal truth of the new theory was always there, even before the first scientist figured it out, and in that sense, it became the best approximation to truth as soon as that first scientist got it in his or her head. The rest was just a matter of communication.

We seem to have weathered the first spate of alarmist predictions that AI will take over the world and end civilisation, but as Weil points out, sudden catastrophic disasters were never the most likely threat. Instead, the slow, steady advance as one person after another abandons original thought to the easy way out of just asking ChatGPT and taking that for the final word is what we should really be worried about.

And as I've pointed out elsewhere, a great amount of damage to the body politic has already been done by AI-powered social media which has polarised politics to an unprecedented degree. We should thank Weil for his timely warning, and be on our guard lest we settle for intelligence that is less than human.

What do you think of these observations regarding AI? Let us know your thoughts below.

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. His ebook Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering in the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in theiTunes store. 

This article has been republished, with permission, from his blog Engineering Ethics.

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