Why ‘Woke’ Chatbots Are the New Culture War Battlefields
America’s culture wars are entering a new battlefield.
Elon Musk may be developing a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and has reached out to AI researchers about forming a new research lab, according to a report by The Information last Monday. But Musk’s latest venture isn’t simply to stay competitive in Silicon Valley’s new arms race—his motivations are also ideological.
“The danger of training AI to be woke—in other words, lie—is deadly,” Musk tweeted last December. When a journalist at the conservative publication The Washington Free Beacon tweeted, “ChatGPT says it is never morally permissible to utter a racial slur—even if doing so is the only way to save millions of people from a nuclear bomb," Musk replied: “Concerning.” When Alex Epstein, an energy expert who has advocated the use of fossil fuels, tweeted a screenshot of ChatGPT refusing to be in favor of fossil fuels, the Tesla CEO responded, "There is great danger in training an AI to lie."