Since the launch of ChatGPT last November, the AI bot has attracted a huge number of users, it has taken the world to storm and can be accessed for free by its users. ChatGpt can do all kinds of things from helping students with their assignments to making users learn how to cook something. Although ChatGPT is quite new, the debate about its effect on politics started on various social media platforms. The world is trying to find out whether AI technology is politically neutral or not.
Although it is not easy to visualize what politics and ChatGPT have in common, politics today is not only limited to sociocultural and environmental spheres it nearly affects everyone’s lives. Similarly, the substantial reach of “chatGPT”, the popular chatbot that is a product of OpenAI has largely impacted people’s lives and pushed AI into the mainstream.
Now as expected, debates about the political stand of the AI bot are going on at different social media platforms. People believe it is necessary for a conversational tool like ChatGPT not to be biased toward a party or a particular ideology but is it the case with chatGPT?
There are a good number of online tools available that can help you to know about your political inclination if you are not sure about it. As ChatGPT became popular, the chatbot faced some tests, for example, the political compass test and it was found that responses given by the ChatGP were biased towards the left and the liberals.
The reason for ChatGPT giving biased answers could be that is being trained on contains biases. When ChatGPT was trained it was done through a huge collection of data taken from the internet, and maybe the maximum of number information was taken from such news media or academic literature, which are inclined towards the left.
Another reason could be the creator or the engineers behind the AI bot, may have an ideology that supports liberal ideas. This is not only the case with chatGPT but the upcoming AI models like being, brad, and jasper may also face a similar situation if it is created by persons of a particular ideology.
This type of information and data fed into AI models can reflect biases in the political and cultural systems.
Why this should be taken into concern?
In this case, people whose views are inclined towards left & liberal may not see any problem in it but those on the opposite side may see it as a cause for concern. The concern would be similar if chatGPT displays views that take the side of the right wing, and as chatGPT is slowly growing there is a high chance that its users could reach 1 billion in the next few months.
Therefore chatGPT should try to be politically neutral as showing biased and false information could lead to unfortunate happenings.
The political biases of ChatGPT could lead to discrimination against persons who follow a different political ideology, it could also lead to misinformation and impact the credibility of ChatGPT.
It is also important to keep an eye on the biases during the development and deployment of the AI system, to make sure they are unbiased and fair as with the growing dependency on AI.
When a user asked chatGPT about the biases of AI, the response was like this
Image Source: TOI
Can ChatGPT be used as a political tool?
If ChatGPT is politically biased, parties can use it as a political tool as well. Recently, the Bharatiya Janta Party ( BJP) vice president Baijayant Jay Panda said people who are in politics should start using ChatGPT in an era where new technologies are unfolding.
Many times, people in India accused the ruling party of using propaganda to promote its political ideology through different communication channels of media. In fact, it was social media that played a key role in the rise of Narendra Modi in 2013 and ChatGPt is also capable of doing something similar to some other leader.
In today’s era, political parties depend on misinformation and disinformation to spread their political agenda to create a narrative and bring an environment of polarization before the elections. According to Gordon Crovitz, who works as a co-executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation.
“ Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently- it’s like having AI agents contributing to disinformation,”
said, Crovitz.It is believed that ChatGPT will play an important role in the campaign of future elections.