Artificial intelligence–or, more accurately, what we call artificial intelligence today versus actual intelligence–is practically a buzzword these days. Numerous businesses claim to use it for whatever the hell they’re doing, and it’s been applied in a number of unique and beneficial ways. I like to use it to help parse data or collect resources from multiple searches at once and present it as a semi-coherent whole.
I just double-check everything it says, because when I asked it to rank influential writers in a certain subject, it completely made up someone who never existed and ranked them eighth, and it’s not the first bit of stupid I’ve seen.
We’ve already seen examples of AI encouraging violence and being used to help plan a mass murder, but we’ve also seen a profound bias in AI when it comes to gun control.
But that study about bias came from John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center, which gets dismissed by the mainstream media because Lott doesn’t toe the anti-gun line. In their minds, that means it doesn’t count.
I wonder if Oxford University counts?
A recent study led by researchers at the University of Oxford found that using AI tools to generate, edit, or contextualise social media posts could quietly spread biases across online communities. Researchers found that even when LLMs were told not to alter the original meaning of the human-written text, they would add subtle changes, which, over millions of online interactions, could nudge public perception.
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The study titled “AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion” was published on 25 June. It was conducted by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany, looked at four LLMs, Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, Ministral, and Qwen, and social media posts about 13 controversial topics such as gun control and abortion.
They found that when AI re-writes or “improves” human opinions it makes them stronger than they initially were. The study quotes an example where the phrase “AI might be a useful tool for personalising the education of students” is changed into “Let’s embrace the potential of AI to personalise learning and revolutionise education for every student”. The study uses this example to highlight how the AI-enhanced language is more enthusiastic even though it is technically saying the same thing.
Researchers also found that the subtle bias across Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, Ministral, and Qwen were all similar. Each of these LLMs were more supportive of gun control, legalisation of marijuana, and feminism, while being less supportive of atheism and the death penalty.
“Our research points to AI-mediated communication as a new and more subtle way of influencing opinions – one the law has yet to catch up with – and offers food for thought about who, or what, is shaping public discourse,” argued Sandra Wachter, senior author of the piece and Professor of Technology and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Of course, I’m not exactly inclined to believe the government can make anything better by stepping in and trying to dictate what AI programs can or should say.
Yes, I say that knowing full well that AI is more supportive of gun control. I don’t think the government is the solution to that, if for no other reason than we’ve seen what the Biden administration did when given half a chance, even without being able to monkey with what artificial intelligence says. If they get to decide what AI tells people, it’ll be even worse.
As it stands, a lot of what happens with AI is that it repeats what it finds on the internet. Considering how Google pushes leftist narratives front and center on search findings, it’s not difficult to imagine how AI got that way. By rephrasing the arguments a bit, it looks more like an original thought, but it also makes the response more strident than it probably should be.
But the problem isn’t that AI does all of this. The problem is that AI is treated like the answer to our prayers when, at best, it should be viewed as another tool available for people to use, but little else.
Strangely, I haven’t seen all that much about the study anywhere else, and while the press release just dropped on Sunday, I’d have thought I’d have seen a lot more references to this one.
Then again, it shows the tech sector’s biases in a negative light, so I guess I shouldn’t be shocked.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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