An Advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI Has a Way to Make AI More Like Donald Trump
A researcher affiliated with Elon Musk’s startup xAI has found a new way to both measure and manipulate entrenched preferences and values expressed by artificial intelligence models—including their political views.
The work was led by Dan Hendrycks, director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety and an adviser to xAI. He suggests that the technique could be used to make popular AI models better reflect the will of the electorate. “Maybe in the future, [a model] could be aligned to the specific user,” Hendrycks told WIRED. But in the meantime, he says, a good default would be using election results to steer the views of AI models. He’s not saying a model should necessarily be “Trump all the way,” but he argues it should be biased toward Trump slightly, “because he won the popular vote.”
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This article is troubling. The fundamental purpose of AI should be to process information and reach conclusions based on facts and logic. The suggestion that AI should be programmed to align with election results undermines the entire concept of artificial intelligence as a tool for objective analysis and truth-seeking.
If AI is deliberately biased to reflect majority opinions rather than verifiable truth, it becomes an echo chamber that amplifies existing beliefs, true or false. This would make AI not just unreliable due to accidental hallucinations, but actively harmful as a source of intentionally biased misinformation.
Given Musk’s track record of using his influence to manipulate public opinion, this development is completely unsurprising.
