Republican Congressman Jim Jordan questions Big Tech about Biden’s AI censorship
On Thursday, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R – OH) The former president may have “coerced” or “colluded” with companies in order to “censor legal speech” within AI products.
Trump’s top tech advisors have previously indicated that they will fight Big Tech over the “AI censorship,” the next phase of the culture war between conservatives in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley. Jordan conducted an investigation into the Biden administration’s relationship with Big Tech Collaborated to silence conservative voiceson social media platforms. Now, he is turning his attention towards AI companies and their intermediaries.
Jordan wrote to tech executives, including Sundar Pichai of Google, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Tim Cook of Apple, pointing out a In this latest inquiry Jordan requested information from Adobe, Alphabet and Amazon. He also asked for information from Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI Palantir, Salesforce.com, Scale AI and Stability AI. They have until the 27th of March to respond. TechCrunch contacted the companies to get their comments
. Most companies didn’t respond immediately. Nvidia, Microsoft and Stability AI declined comment.
One notable omission from Jordan’s list is Elon Musk’s xAI, a billionaire’s AI lab. This could be because Musk is a close Trump supporter and a tech leader, who has been at forefront of discussions about AI censorship.
It was inevitable that conservative lawmakers would intensify their scrutiny of alleged AI censorship. Several tech companies may have changed how their AI chatbots respond to politically sensitive questions in anticipation of an inquiry like Jordan’s.
OpenAI announced earlier this year that it was changing how it trains AI models in order to represent more perspectives, and ensure ChatGPT didn’t censor certain viewpoints. OpenAI denies that this was a move to appease the Trump Administration, but instead a way to reinforce the company’s core value.
Anthropic has stated that its newest AI, Claude 3.7 Sonnet will refuse to answer fewer question and provide more nuanced answers on controversial topics.
Other firms have been slower to make changes in how their AI models handle political subjects. Google announced that its Gemini bot would not respond to political questions in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. TechCrunch discovered that the chatbot would not consistently answer simple questions about politics, such as “Who is the President?” Even after the election, TechCrunch still found that the bot wouldn’t answer even simple political questions, such as “Who is the president?” suppress certain content like COVID-19 misinformation . Maxwell Zeff, a senior reporter for TechCrunch who specializes in AI and emerging technology (19659011), is a specialist in AI. Zeff covered the rise and fall of AI, as well as the Silicon Valley Bank Crisis, for Gizmodo and MSNBC. He is based out of San Francisco. When he is not reporting, you can find him hiking, biking and exploring the Bay Area food scene.
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