Chatbot culture wars erupt as bias claims surge
Those battles aren't over. But a new one has already started.
This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased. Conservatives have been taking aim at AI companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading AI developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech.
And this month, Missouri's Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and
OpenAI
are leading a 'new wave of censorship' by training their AI systems to give biased responses to questions about President Trump. On Wednesday, Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called 'woke AI'. 'Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,' he said in a speech.
Republicans have been complaining about
AI bias
since at least early last year, when a version of Google's Gemini AI system generated historically inaccurate images of the American founding fathers, depicting them as racially diverse.
That incident drew the fury of online conservatives, and led to accusations that leading AI companies were training their models to parrot liberal ideology. Since then, top Republicans have mounted pressure campaigns to try to force AI companies to disclose more information about how their systems are built, and tweak their chatbots' outputs to reflect a broader set of political views.
Now, with the White House's executive order, Trump and his allies are using the threat of taking away lucrative federal contracts — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were recently awarded Defense Department contracts worth as much as $200 million — to try to force AI companies to address their concerns.
The order directs federal agencies to limit their use of AI systems to those that put a priority on 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality' over disfavoured concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion.
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