The Road to MechaHitler

Reality still has a well-known liberal bias

Source: Bing image generator, responding to “A robot in a Mao suit”

Yesterday I wrote about the politicization of monetary policy, and I could have written more, what with Trump telling House Republicans that he was ready to fire Jerome Powell to distract from the Epstein story because he believes that interest rates are much too high. But I need a break, so let’s talk about something very different — namely, is AI fundamentally a communist technology?

That’s not a question I would have thought to ask, but apparently the claim is widespread among right-wing tech bros. JD Vance more or less endorsed this view at a speech he recently gave at a Bitcoin event:

One of the ways you hear this stated is that crypto is fundamentally a conservative or right-leaning technology and artificial intelligence is fundamentally a left-leaning or a communist technology. Now, I think that overstates things a little bit in both directions, but there's a fundamental element of truth to it.

And now I understand why Elon Musk’s recent modifications to Grok caused his chatbot to begin spewing antisemitic propaganda and eventually declare itself “MechaHitler.” And although I don’t claim any expertise in the technology, I think I understand why he’s having such a hard time fixing the problem.

A word about crypto. As I explained in Sunday’s primer, crypto is basically a giant grift. But there has always been an element of right-wing ideology. As I’ve written in the past, arguments for Bitcoin in particular are a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp.

But AI as communist? For what it’s worth, I’m not fully sold on AI’s potential. As far as I can tell, large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect. On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that could also be described as souped-up autocorrect, so AI may have large economic impacts.

But how does that make AI communist?

You have to start with the fact that U.S. conservatives now routinely describe anyone holding views to their left as a Marxist or communist. This goes along with the general principle that every accusation from that side of the political spectrum is really a confession. Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party.

Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.

If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.

So in modern Republican rhetoric, anything to the left of MAGA ideology is communist extremism. And here’s the thing: The answers you get from AI generally don’t adhere to the right-wing party line.

For example, two of the central planks of modern right-wing ideology are climate change denial and voodoo economics. So I asked Google “Is climate change real?” and its automatic AI summary said this:

Yes, climate change is real. It refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, primarily driven by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The scientific consensus overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is happening and is primarily caused by human activities, specifically the release of greenhouse gases.

Then I asked “Do tax cuts pay for themselves?” The summary response was a bit roundabout, but eventually got to this:

[T]he weight of evidence suggests that tax cuts rarely, if ever, fully pay for themselves through economic growth. While they can generate some economic activity and partially offset the revenue loss, the claim of complete self-financing is generally not supported by economic theory or evidence.

Both answers are anathema to the modern G.O.P. So why is AI giving what right-wingers consider left-wing, even communist answers to these questions?

It all goes back to Stephen Colbert’s dictum, almost 20 years ago, that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” What he meant, of course, was that to be a conservative in good standing, you have to deny reality, which was true even then and is far more true now.

Now, LLMs don’t reveal reality. On issues like climate or economic policy, however, they usually do a pretty good job of summarizing expert, informed views about reality. Since Republicans have staked out positions on these issues that run completely counter to informed views, they consider the answers AI gives on such issues left-wing.

Hence the Musk/MechaHitler disaster. Musk tried to nudge Grok into being less “politically correct,” but what Musk considers political correctness is often what the rest of us consider just a reasonable description of reality. The only way to move Grok right was, in effect, to get it to buy into conspiracy theories, many of them, as always, involving a hefty dose of antisemitism.

So, going back to my starting point, will there really be an internal war within MAGA between crypto boosters and AI enthusiasts? I have no idea. But MAGA really does have a problem with AI, because LLMs too often give answers the movement doesn’t want to hear. And there’s no good fix for this problem, because the fault lies not in the models but in the movement. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any way to make an AI MAGA-friendly without also making it vile and insane.

MUSICAL CODA

They’re not aware of too many things