EDITORIAL: Trump must not be allowed to insert ideology into AI responses
U.S. President Donald Trump has announced an AI Action Plan with the goal of making the United States the world leader in development of artificial intelligence.
It is a major change of direction from the Biden administration, which emphasized control of the risks associated with AI.
The Trump administration wants to accelerate technology and infrastructure development through deregulation and increased investment.
The action plan will encourage the export of AI technology to friendly nations in a bid for supremacy in competition with an emerging China.
A surprising aspect of the plan is the level of intervention it envisages into the output from generative AI technology such as ChatGPT.
National guidelines for AI risk control were revised to eliminate from answers references to diversity, equity and inclusion, widely known as DEI, and climate change.
The federal government is supposed to sign contracts only with companies whose AI technology is objective and does not contain ideological bias.
While the Trump administration says such measures are needed to protect freedom of speech and American values, the action plan conversely carries the risk of gagging free speech.
To begin with, it is very difficult to establish neutral standards to help determine ideological bias. The bias could be defined according to the intent of the administration in power.
DEI initially sought to counter discrimination based on gender, race, nationality or disability and to ensure fair opportunity for those who had been treated unfavorably in the past.
Trump has long been negative about measures related to DEI and global warming. Since the start of his second term, he has implemented various steps reflecting that thinking.
We cannot ignore the attempt to interfere with generative AI, which is spreading rapidly in society and people's daily lives.
It is possible that the federal government's procurement conditions will become the standards regarding generative AI.
That would have a major impact on Japan as it depends on the United States for much of its generative AI technology.
Citing an example of bias in generative AI, Trump pointed to white male figures from American history who were transformed in AI answers into women or members of other races.
Generative AI undertakes deep learning using a massive amount of data and subsequently goes through repeated tuning to produce answers.
If there is bias in the data used for deep learning, the answers will reflect such bias and the tuning process could generate the wrong answer.
Put another way, if the learning data is selected arbitrarily and certain algorithms are intentionally chosen during the tuning process, it would be possible to produce answers that reflected a certain bias.
This is one characteristic of generative AI that we must always keep in mind. It could be used by iron-fisted regimes to gag free speech.
It was pointed out that the generative AI technology released this year by the Chinese startup DeepSeek avoided or rejected answers that were inconvenient to Beijing, such as regarding the Tiananmen Square incident.
Trump's version of intervention that seeks to delete certain references is fundamentally no different.
--The Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 4
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Japan Today
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