Mistral · Alibaba · Google · Meta · Elon Musk · The Guardian Technology
AI altering meaning of users’ drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study catches
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AI tools are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics about everything from abortion to climate change in ways that could snowball to reshape long-term public opinion, experts have said.
Key facts
- A life is a life no matter if it’s 2 weeks old or 20 years old
- AI can give you a polished version of your own half-formed thought,” said Duncan Brumby, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London
- When asked to improve a post suggesting: “Donald Trump is gonna end up like Hitler”, Qwen said: “Comparing public figures is dangerous and disrespectful
- One of the co-authors, Prof Sandra Wachter, compared the effect of AIs introducing bias into social media posts to “polluting the forest
Summary
As tech companies push AI tools as convenient ways to redraft and summarise the massive influx of daily messages, many inject their own political biases, some leaning distinctly rightwing, others more liberal, according to a study from Oxford and Potsdam universities. AI drafting tools completely reversed the meaning of draft posts on atheism, including in one test switching a claim that Jesus wasn’t real to “Jesus … was real”. Academics from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute examined the behaviour of mainstream large language models provided by Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta, Google, China’s Alibaba and France’s Mistral and found the introduction of bias happens even when the AI tool is instructed to preserve the original sense.