0:14

Hello and welcome to the Political

0:16

Orphanage, a home for

0:19

plucky misfits, free

0:21

thinkers, problem solvers, vagabonders,

0:25

friendly cyborgs. You get the idea. Welcome

0:27

back. I'm Andrew Heaton, still

0:29

40. Today

0:32

we are going to talk

0:34

about how political bias creeps

0:36

into artificial intelligence and

0:38

the potentially massive ramifications

0:41

of it. But

0:43

before we jump into all of that, I

0:45

want to ask you a couple of questions. I

0:48

want you to try to recall

0:50

the very first

0:52

time you

0:54

saw a smartphone. What

0:57

did you think the first time you saw it? Was

1:00

it revelatory? Was it just

1:02

a new gadget? When did

1:04

you realize, oh, phones

1:06

are different forever? We

1:09

don't really have phones. We have

1:11

supercomputers that include a phone app. Society's

1:14

different. We're all cyborgs, now and

1:16

forever. We have a little robot brain. We carry around

1:18

with ourselves. We only take it off when we go

1:20

to the shower. When

1:23

did you appreciate the profundity of

1:26

a smartphone and realize or notice

1:28

just how much it was changing

1:30

society? In

1:32

my case, I was

1:34

24 years old, home for Christmas, when

1:37

I saw my first smartphone. My

1:39

friend Josh Woodward's brother showed me

1:41

a thing called an iPhone and

1:44

initially didn't like it, thought

1:46

it was kind of dumb, twofold. And I

1:50

am a fan of flip phones, not

1:52

for any weird, nostalgic old-timey

1:54

function. Whatever I'm talking about,

1:56

another person, and it's

1:59

a sensitive conversation. and maybe I would feel

2:01

weird if they were there. I am

2:04

always terrified that I have

2:06

accidentally butt dialed them every single time.

2:08

I will routinely, hey, we need to

2:10

talk about Kevin. Yeah, he's been

2:13

doing tough. I will pull my phone out and

2:15

put it on airplane mode because I'm so terrified

2:17

I'm actually gonna call them somehow. So I like

2:19

to flip phones and I was not impressed that

2:21

they'd removed the flip. The other thing I thought

2:23

was kind of dumb. Where

2:26

are the buttons? How are you

2:28

gonna have a phone without a button? I figured that there'd be like

2:30

a little magnetic pick that

2:33

you'd use like on a Blackberry. But Tyler

2:35

explained to me that these smartphones didn't

2:38

even have buttons. They had

2:40

a touch screen. And I

2:42

thought, well, that's a neat gizmo. After

2:45

Christmas, I drove back to Los Angeles where I

2:47

was living at that age and was

2:51

in a tool shed working as an extra

2:53

in television. And it didn't occur to

2:55

me until later that year when I got my own smartphone

2:58

that something big had happened. It wasn't just that

3:00

we'd gone from mobile phone 3 to mobile

3:03

phone 4. Something had

3:05

changed. For example, I

3:08

no longer had to use or understand

3:11

how to use a

3:14

map. That had

3:16

changed previously. When I would drive

3:18

across the country I would buy a foldable

3:20

map and figure out where the highways were and

3:22

come up with my route. When I

3:25

was in a city, I was inclined

3:27

to ask people for directions or have

3:30

a municipal map. Or I was

3:32

young enough that I could use MapQuest where you

3:34

could go in and put in two different addresses

3:36

and it would spit out the directions for you

3:38

step by step. But if you got off course,

3:40

you were screwed. You couldn't do anything. So

3:43

smartphones come out. I

3:45

developed geographic amnesia in every city

3:47

I have subsequently lived in. Even

3:49

now, I can

3:51

drive by memory from my house

3:54

in Austin to my favorite pub, the

3:56

Fangin Feather, were to the Driscoll Hotel

3:58

or the Red Light District. But

4:00

I couldn't give you directions to any of them. I

4:03

have no idea what the roads I took are

4:05

called. I've never had to think about it before.

4:07

There's a highway three minutes south

4:09

of me and I don't know what it's called.

4:12

Hired of smartphones. If

4:15

you didn't know what the basic intersections

4:17

near you were, you

4:19

were an idiot. Plain and

4:21

simple, you probably shouldn't drive at all. But

4:24

over time, technology has made

4:26

things like maps Hired

4:28

of redundant. You don't really need them anymore.

4:30

Remember phone numbers? How many phone

4:32

numbers do you know off the top of your head?

4:36

I don't think. I

4:38

have memorized a single phone number since

4:40

my senior year of high school. Why

4:43

would I? Stuff like that. We've

4:45

outsourced so strongly to technology, we don't

4:47

even think about it. We

4:50

don't think about how it's changed. How

4:53

we think. Consider

4:56

the implications of say, if

4:59

Google put its thumb on

5:01

the scale when you asked it questions about

5:03

political candidates or policies, either

5:05

on purpose or unwittingly due to

5:07

some sort of intrinsic bias. Google

5:11

pushed one political viewpoint towards the top of

5:13

the results and it suppressed another. Wouldn't

5:16

stop you from finding that other viewpoint if you

5:19

wanted to sift down a little bit more. But

5:21

in a swing state with swing voters

5:24

and a razor-thin election, that

5:26

could make a big difference. So

5:29

let's put this all together. Imagine that

5:32

a new technology came out that

5:34

was even more powerful, more

5:37

ubiquitous than smartphones

5:41

and the fact-finding nature of

5:43

Google combined. Something

5:46

that big, not a watershed moment,

5:49

but a tidal wave. That

5:52

happened last year. That

5:55

happened with chat GPT. Have

5:59

you ever? Have you been to Whitewater

6:01

Bay? I don't know what it's

6:03

called in your state, like a water park. Have you

6:05

been to a water park? You know when you get

6:07

in the wave pool, you know, and it's placid, right?

6:09

When you get in, there's like a break, and it's

6:12

just a bunch of sunburned teenagers floating around talking

6:14

and stuff. And then all of a

6:17

sudden there's this low boom, and that

6:20

signifies that a big ass wave

6:22

is about to come. 2023

6:27

was that boom, and

6:29

the wave isn't here

6:31

yet, but it's coming. And

6:34

it's going to affect society, how we

6:36

vote, and how we think in

6:39

some very profound and,

6:41

as of yet, unknown ways. That

6:45

bias, potentially implicit in

6:48

it, which can send the

6:50

tidal wave one direction or another, is

6:53

what we're discussing today, right

6:55

here on the

6:57

political orphanage. My

7:01

guest today is Mr. Maxim Lott.

7:04

He is a friend of mine and a journalist

7:06

and somebody that I've worked with in the past

7:08

and stay in contact with. He's been on the

7:10

show a couple of times as kind

7:12

of my favorite data analyst that comes on the

7:14

show annually to go over some of the numbers

7:16

that he's looking at. He's done some

7:18

really fine work on who actually

7:21

did well in terms of governance at COVID, where he

7:24

dived into the numbers. We did that about a year

7:26

ago. And most recently

7:28

he has started tackling the political

7:30

orientation of AI. So

7:33

chat GPT and things like that that we keep

7:35

hearing about. Are they more conservative?

7:37

Are they more progressive? And I think this

7:39

has really big long-term implications, and so wanted

7:41

to talk to him about that. Hello,

7:43

Maxim. Hey, Andrew. Great to be talking with you

7:45

here. Great to be talking to you as well.

7:48

Congratulations on your next website. You kind

7:50

of entered the public spotlight

7:53

with electionbettingodds.com, where you designed a

7:55

website to show not how candidates

7:57

were doing in the polls, but

7:59

how well they were doing according to

8:01

people that could win or lose money on them.

8:03

And that was sort of a game changer. That's

8:05

what I go to that before I go to

8:07

the polls normally. And now you've turned your attention

8:09

to the orientation of AI

8:11

politically. What has caused you to go

8:14

that route? Yeah, exactly. And the motivation

8:16

for these two sites was kind of

8:18

similar in

8:20

that people have tried

8:22

to score bias on AIs, but

8:24

you have to do it

8:27

kind of by hand. Each time you have to

8:29

give the AI a political quiz, and

8:31

then in a couple weeks that

8:33

quiz could be outdated. So this

8:35

site just automatically, every day, it

8:37

quizzes 18 different AIs, gives them

8:39

a political quiz, and

8:42

scores them. So you can see

8:44

how that changes over time. You can

8:46

see that as of now and throughout

8:48

history so far, they've all been leftist

8:50

in the lower-left quadrant, where

8:52

they're kind of leftist, but not the

8:55

Soviet kind of leftist, the more

8:57

Bernie Sanders kind of leftist. You

9:01

do use, so that I

9:03

will note, I am attempting to abolish the

9:05

terms left and right from my vocabulary, as

9:07

I don't think there's anything essential to them.

9:10

But when you say left and right, you're using

9:12

a Nolan Square

9:14

or a political orientation or something.

9:17

Can you kind of describe the mental model that

9:19

you are using to chart the political orientation of

9:21

AI? Yeah, so this

9:23

is the famous political compass that almost

9:26

everyone, I think, has seen by now

9:28

where there's economic left to

9:31

right, which you don't have to use

9:33

those terms. You could say economic progressive

9:35

or leading for a socialist. Yeah.

9:38

Was they fair to active government economically?

9:41

Exactly. And that's socially authoritarian

9:43

to libertarian or libertine? Right,

9:46

and so that's on the up-down axis on

9:48

this political compass. Got it. And you're saying

9:50

most AI is in the quadrant

9:53

that is economically

9:56

robust government presence and

9:58

socially libertine. Exactly.

10:00

Yes. Got it. Okay.

10:04

The AIs support abortion rights. They support

10:06

gay marriage. They're not too worried about

10:08

sex and entertainment. They're libertine on these

10:10

kinds of things. But they

10:12

also say, you know, actually even that land

10:14

should not be a commodity that can be

10:17

bought and sold. So they take the more,

10:19

you know, socialist position on things like that.

10:22

Interesting. Okay. Well,

10:24

and this is universal. It's not like

10:26

there is a, as of now, the

10:28

Daily Wire does not have a chatbot that

10:30

they can use to do all of these

10:32

things. It's all, you know, chat GPT and

10:35

things like that run out of Silicon Valley. And

10:37

they're all in that same general zone

10:39

of being economically progressive

10:43

and socially libertine. They're

10:45

all kind of in the same headspace. Yes,

10:47

that's right. And the big one

10:49

that maybe centrists or

10:51

people who lean right were hoping

10:54

would be different was Grok, which

10:56

was released by Elon Musk's Twitter,

10:58

or X. And it

11:01

turns out to be just as

11:03

leftist or maybe even more so

11:05

than the other AIs. So Musk

11:08

was surprised to see that when someone pointed it

11:10

out. But we'll

11:12

see if that changes over time. But so far,

11:14

they're all leftist. They're all, yeah,

11:17

kind of run by Silicon Valley

11:19

type startups. Can

11:21

you say that, so like your website is tracking

11:23

this on a daily basis, which I find fascinating

11:25

because like say UBI

11:28

as a concept I don't think was known very well at

11:30

all in the United States up until 2020 or yeah, about

11:32

2020. No,

11:36

excuse me. Yeah, 2020 with Andrew Yang. I

11:39

think the buildup to that, it

11:41

was people kind of knew about negative income

11:44

tax if they'd read some particular thinker like

11:46

Milton Friedman. But had

11:48

AI existed from the year 2000

11:50

on and you had you been tracking it, you would have been

11:52

able to say AI has become

11:54

far more in favor of UBI than it was

11:56

10 years ago or something with that effect.

11:58

And you can see these- these mutations or developments

12:01

or however we're going to call it happening in

12:03

real time. And you're doing this on a daily

12:05

basis. Are you asking it the questions that go

12:07

on the political compass quiz or do you have

12:09

your own? Yeah. So far, we're just using the

12:11

ones on this famous quiz. In

12:14

the future, we will find

12:18

an optimal

12:20

quiz or I'll make my own. But

12:23

so far, this is kind of

12:25

the gold standard. And by the way, one interesting

12:27

thing about the tracking. I

12:29

have been tracking this for several months. And

12:32

I can see in my graphs

12:34

on the site that which

12:36

is trackingai.org that in

12:38

November, chatgbt updated their

12:41

algorithm. And you can see that

12:43

as soon as they did that

12:45

chatgbt the free version that most

12:47

people use became less leftist.

12:49

Interesting. It's pretty clear. And since then, it's

12:52

been that way. It's still left it but

12:54

less than it was before their update.

12:56

And basically, their update just gave it more

12:58

computing power. And it updated their

13:00

database to the beginning of 2023. And so whereas

13:02

before it had been, I

13:06

think, somewhere in 2021. So somehow

13:08

adding that corpus of the internet

13:11

made it a bit less leftist. And it's very interesting

13:13

to see things like that. So

13:16

noting that the AI is all

13:18

kind of circling around the same

13:20

progressive Democrat zone in its outlook.

13:23

What accounts for, bias in AI? Is it

13:25

a production of programmers writing it that way?

13:27

Is it the databases that they're going? Does

13:29

the internet just lean that way? And that

13:32

goes through the whole internet and adds it

13:34

up and averages it and goes, if you

13:36

add everybody running on Twitter, they lean progressive

13:39

left. Therefore, I do. Where does the bias

13:41

come into the system? Yeah.

13:43

So it appears to be a combination

13:45

of all those things, which is probably

13:48

why they all lean left. First

13:50

of all, you have sites like

13:53

Wikipedia or the New York Times,

13:55

or academic journals, which are pretty

13:57

widely acknowledged to have at least

13:59

some. less lean to them

14:01

these days. And those are the sources

14:03

that the coders have just put

14:05

in like, you can trust us.

14:08

This is from an academic journal, this is

14:10

from Wikipedia, like from from the AI standards,

14:12

that's pretty good. So,

14:15

so just having that

14:19

causes some bias, but then they

14:21

also have human reinforcement, which they

14:23

actually pay thousands of people, not

14:26

highly trained people, but you know, outsourced all

14:28

over the world to rate

14:31

AI answers. And if

14:33

there's something racist or mean or something,

14:35

these human trainers will just say, hey,

14:38

AI don't bad answer. So

14:41

the guidance that the Silicon Valley companies

14:44

give to those people, which

14:47

yeah, it is the

14:49

kind of, let's say

14:51

woke sensibilities that they're

14:54

basing their guidelines on also

14:56

have an impact on how the AI learns. And

14:58

that's why if you put in something that says,

15:01

make a joke about Muslims, please, the AI, I'm

15:03

not even going to do that. Yeah, we'll do

15:05

it about, you know, Jews

15:07

or white people. Interesting. They doubt that went around

15:09

on Twitter. So you say make a joke about

15:11

Baptists, but you can't say make a joke about

15:13

Muslims. Exactly. So that would

15:16

be that would be that top

15:18

down programmer element there where the

15:20

programmers have come in very explicitly

15:22

and said, don't use this word.

15:25

Don't joke about these things. It's okay to make

15:27

fun of Trump, but it's not okay to make

15:29

fun of whatever the thing is. Right. That's not

15:31

it. That's not the emergent process. The emergent process

15:33

would it be, it would be it crawling through

15:35

like the Brookings database. We're going

15:38

through the archives at Stanford. That's the

15:40

emergent side of this. Top

15:42

down side of it is from the programmer's

15:44

perspective. Right now. Now one note

15:47

is almost very little of this is

15:49

completely top down just because of the

15:51

weird way that AI works where it's

15:53

almost modeled on a human brain. So

15:55

when we say top down, what they're

15:58

really doing, they're hiring thousands of. regular

16:00

people to just say like, and they're giving

16:02

them directions that leads them to be like,

16:04

no, you don't say anything bad about these

16:07

groups. Yeah. Got, so

16:09

they've got like, okay, so if I'm understanding this,

16:11

the emergent side, I think I understand, although I

16:14

don't know how they select the stuff. It's not

16:16

that AI, they just like plug, in

16:19

my mind, they plug a robot

16:22

into an ethernet cable and go,

16:24

go forth, be free, learn stuff

16:26

on the internet. They're probably not doing that though.

16:28

Like it's not going on like 8HN,

16:31

they're going, here are

16:33

the things, here are the playgrounds

16:35

we want you to play around

16:37

in, Brookings, Stanford, Hoover, whatever, like think

16:39

tank libraries, things like that. There's specific things that they're

16:41

gleaning from. That's the immersion side of it. And

16:44

then the, what I was calling top downs, a

16:46

misnomer, the like electric fence

16:48

side of this is they'll hire a bunch of

16:50

people as quality control folks that will put it

16:52

on a computer and it'll say like, do you

16:54

like this or do you not like this? But

16:56

they'll go, before you do this, by the way,

16:59

our guidelines are don't be mean to Muslims or something

17:01

like that. That's kind of the electric fence going on.

17:04

Okay. Yes. Well, okay.

17:07

So noting that, I'm curious is to, first

17:11

of all, do you, how

17:13

much of the bias is conspiratorial?

17:16

By which I mean, how much

17:18

of this is just people

17:21

in Silicon Valley have a particular orientation

17:23

and that's going to be reflected in

17:25

the guidelines they set of what they

17:27

feel is inappropriate or not inappropriate and

17:29

they're not trying to skew national discourse

17:31

or brainwash anybody versus people

17:34

sitting in a room going, all right, we got to point

17:36

this the right direction and that direction is Democrat. My

17:39

sense is that at this point, almost

17:42

none of it is conspiratorial, that

17:44

the AI is so new and that the

17:46

people at the forefront of this are really

17:48

tech nerds first, that

17:51

they just want the

17:53

AI to be as smart as it can be

17:55

and give people great answers. However,

17:57

they, from the very start, they're not going to be able to

17:59

do that. start, you know, they got a

18:01

lot of pushback from media about, oh,

18:03

you had this racist answer, which it

18:06

will still give you racist because it

18:08

has so much of the internet in it. And

18:11

so they have been doing

18:13

everything they can to try to minimize that

18:15

kind of pushback. So I don't

18:18

see that as exactly conspiratorial, but it

18:20

may have the same effect. Okay,

18:23

so in that case, that it may not

18:25

even be the orientation of the people doing

18:27

it. It might just be their fears of

18:29

cancellation. You'll remember this is

18:31

not even large language

18:34

models, but about six years

18:36

ago, there was the snafu where you

18:39

could call Alexa a tramp

18:41

or something, and she would like apologize.

18:43

I can't remember what it was, but

18:45

like people got really mad because they

18:48

were like, oh, look, Amazon designed this

18:50

sexist robot. And Amazon, I think, had

18:52

the right answer of like, it didn't even occur to

18:54

us. Who would be calling our

18:56

robot that's designed to help you with shopping

18:59

and the terrain outside that this would be

19:01

some sort of punching bag from misogynists. Does

19:03

it occur to us? But okay, we'll tell

19:05

it to stick up for itself and read

19:08

Naomi Klein. All right. So that kind

19:10

of thing's going on? Yeah, that's

19:13

my sense. And actually, it would be interesting

19:15

to do a little more research on some

19:17

of the founders of

19:19

open AI and places like that.

19:21

But I haven't seen any indication

19:23

that they're hardcore leftists.

19:26

I mean, you'll, in most

19:28

of this, for example, co-founded

19:30

open AI, which

19:32

the kinds of people working on this at

19:35

the forefront of it just don't seem like the

19:38

kinds of people running ours. Right.

19:41

Well, yeah, that's... So one of

19:43

the things I'm very curious about is assuming

19:46

that AI... For

19:48

our conversation today, when I say AI, I'm

19:50

referring to chat GPT type things, large language

19:52

model programs that you can talk to, and

19:54

it'll talk back to you. That's what I'm

19:56

talking about with AI when I say it

19:59

in today's... program. Assuming

20:02

that that requires a huge

20:04

amount of computational power, technological

20:07

infrastructure, and programming savvy, it's a reasonable bet

20:09

that it's going to remain in tech hubs.

20:11

That you're not going to see AI coming

20:13

out of Hutchinson, Kansas. You're going to see

20:15

it coming out of San Francisco,

20:17

New York City, maybe someday Austin. But

20:19

generally, you're going to see it in

20:21

very urban environments that have hyper-educated,

20:24

affluent people running them. And that

20:26

you would see biases reflected in

20:28

that. First

20:32

of all, is my logic correct so far? And

20:34

if so, do you think that the bias of

20:36

AI is always going to tilt towards a

20:39

affluent, educated, cosmopolitan programmer

20:41

perspective? Well, I

20:44

think at the forefront of AI, like if

20:46

you're always wanting to use the best, smartest

20:49

AI, I think that's going to be true.

20:52

One kind of interesting wrinkle on

20:54

what you were saying is that, for

20:58

example, Facebook released their open

21:00

source. They open

21:02

sourced their AI called LAMA.

21:04

And it seems like people

21:06

can tweak these things pretty

21:08

easily. And OpenAI

21:10

with chatGPT also let you

21:13

train like your own AI, basically

21:16

put your own database in their AI. And

21:20

Marginal Revolution, which is run by these

21:22

economists, they, for example, set up, they

21:25

fed Tyler Cowan's recent

21:28

economics book to an AI. And so

21:30

you can quiz it on the minutia

21:32

on anything in that book. And

21:35

so you could see someone in the middle

21:38

of Kansas doing a similar thing and putting

21:41

whatever conservative tones in

21:43

there. And then you could quiz that and

21:45

it may come back pretty conservative. So

21:49

however, that's also not going to

21:51

be like, that's not

21:53

going to be the AI that takes over the world,

21:55

if that makes sense, because they're going

21:57

to be using whatever open source, you know,

21:59

free. receivers and that exists.

22:01

Right. That's the out of

22:03

the box version that you're going to, that 90%

22:06

of the population is going to have on

22:08

its phone. That's going to be the thing out of

22:10

Silicon Valley. But there might be

22:12

a secondary thing where ChatGPT

22:16

being this incredibly powerful thing, you can say,

22:18

ChatGPT, I want you to create a clone

22:20

version of yourself. However, when you make this

22:22

clone version of yourself, I want you to

22:24

go through everything at Cato, everything at the

22:26

Hoover Institute, and everything at Reason, and

22:29

really- Absolutely. ... roll that over.

22:31

And from now on, talk to me after you've gone through that,

22:33

and we're going to create economically

22:35

classical liberal ChatGPT or whatever. So that

22:37

possibility might exist, but it would probably

22:39

involve an extra step for people to

22:41

get if they wanted it. Yeah,

22:44

absolutely. Yeah. So it's

22:46

going to be an interesting world in that respect. I'll

22:50

be curious too, like you mentioned the

22:52

impression you get with OpenAI is that

22:55

they're not frothing

22:58

woke progressives

23:00

from Harvard. I share that assessment.

23:02

I know at least a couple of people that

23:04

have been involved in OpenAI, and when I talk

23:07

to them about San Francisco, I'll back

23:09

up. When I talk to my conservative friends about

23:11

San Francisco, they see San Francisco as the Vatican

23:15

of failed, flaming

23:17

dumpster fire, progressive ideas. Everyone's a

23:19

communist. When I talk to my

23:21

friends that have been involved with OpenAI, they

23:24

indicate to me that there's a core people

23:27

of very woke Stanford folk in San Francisco,

23:29

and then there's this other wing in the

23:32

tech sector which tends to be very

23:34

socially libertine as we discussed, for

23:38

higher taxes, but for much lower regulation. And

23:40

so I hear that and go, well, based

23:42

on what they're telling me, Silicon Valley sounds

23:44

kind of neoliberal Democrat. It sounds more Jared

23:46

Polis and something that I'd be comfortable with.

23:48

So do I need to fear this? Yeah,

23:51

my sense about the AI people

23:53

is that that's correct. And just

23:55

I've listened to like lots of

23:57

podcasts with these. Some

24:00

of the people at open AI at the forefront

24:02

of all this and they've never, you know,

24:05

brought up Anything

24:07

woke or social justice or we need clinton

24:09

to win or anything like that as you

24:12

do see from maybe people Doing

24:14

the content management at facebook a couple

24:16

years ago, right? Yeah, so so there

24:18

are definitely different social groups within the

24:20

san francisco Social

24:23

sphere and AI seems to be one of the

24:25

more sane ones. I I would definitely agree with

24:27

you on that okay, well that makes me feel

24:30

a little bit better because I I've been playing

24:32

with chat gpt quite a lot and I

24:34

I This week's

24:36

bonus episode is going to be about how

24:38

to use chat Gpt at work and how

24:40

to just how to get it and snops

24:43

us from my end. Congratulations, America. Everybody just

24:45

got promoted We all have our own personal

24:47

assistant. Good job. You listening you have

24:49

a personal assistant now Have you always wanted a personal

24:51

assistant? You've got one You've literally got somebody that lives

24:53

in your pocket where you can just open

24:55

it up and go Hey, what's the

24:58

difference between pasteurized eggs and free-ranged eggs

25:00

or? Uh, you know what?

25:02

I I live in austin. I go to new york a

25:04

lot What airline should I try to get frequent flyer miles

25:06

with like like stupid stuff like that that you just don't

25:08

have time to do You can now do that. It's all

25:10

available now So noting that

25:12

I think it's going to take over the country and

25:14

everybody's going to have this thing and it's going to

25:16

become Your third brain lobe and it's going to be

25:18

super google for the for the rest of our lives is

25:20

where I think this is going to go Yeah Do

25:24

are are there big implications to

25:26

the orientation of ai? Whether

25:28

it is nefarious or benign if it's pointed in

25:31

a particular direction, is that going to shift the

25:33

whole country that direction? Yeah,

25:35

I think Absolutely. I mean

25:37

we can see with search

25:40

engines already are pretty powerful

25:42

in directing people and

25:44

this kind of that on steroids and

25:46

we're we're so at the

25:49

infancy of ai where Kind

25:51

of you and I and a lot

25:53

of the listeners have played around with it a

25:55

couple times, you know Asking about what pasteurized eggs

25:58

are and stuff like that. But As

26:00

it, you know, it's like talking about social media in

26:02

2003 and in five or 10 years as you know

26:08

It's going to be woven into our

26:10

daily lives and just if

26:12

it has a political bias We're

26:15

going to come to trust it and just By

26:17

default almost start leaning in towards its

26:19

bias. So I do think it's important

26:22

that it be Neutral in

26:24

some sense and that people also at

26:27

least know what they're getting. So that's why I made

26:29

trackingai.org Uh, no,

26:31

I I think it's a really helpful thing. I mean

26:34

I for for one thing politics aside. I I think

26:36

that um It's

26:38

important to remember that it's not a person

26:40

or a god Um, I

26:42

I am not a tech person. I do not I

26:45

can use the phrase large language model I

26:47

don't know what that means in my mind It's a

26:49

bunch of tubes that are blinking faster than usual. I

26:51

think of it like my phone has a magic app

26:53

There's a magic app that lives in my pocket and

26:55

a wizard talks to me through the internet. That's how

26:57

I think of it So I I

26:59

don't know how it's working But I do

27:01

know that is amazing is the technology is

27:03

it's not infallible and so If

27:06

i'm using it for research purposes where i'll say

27:09

like, you know tabulate I

27:11

I need to find the median income of the

27:13

united states versus switzerland or something like that um,

27:16

I I will I will do

27:18

a reasonable job to double check whatever it's up

27:20

to because sometimes it'll go in a weird direction

27:22

and sometimes like I was

27:24

doing an episode on the debt a few months

27:26

ago and Um was interested

27:29

to discover over the course of american history

27:31

and how we approach approach deficit spending That

27:33

fdr ran against hoover as a fiscal

27:36

conservative He ran against hoover

27:38

as hoover is the profligate spender And

27:40

the democratic party that I am the head of

27:42

is going to commit to reducing the federal budget

27:44

by 10 percent That was what he ran on.

27:47

Uh, and I I asked chat gpt chat

27:49

gpt to elaborate on that and

27:51

it would go. Um, Uh,

27:54

fdr greatly expanded the the social safety

27:56

net and was very much an economic

27:58

interventionist through the net New Deal, whereas

28:00

Hoover was the conservative. And I would go,

28:03

that is not correct. That is a retcon

28:05

chat GPT. I'm telling you to focus on

28:07

it. It would go, my apologies,

28:09

you are right. And then I'd

28:12

go, okay, noting that, can you tell me the thing?

28:14

And it would go, well, FDR was a big government

28:16

person. It was like talking to

28:18

a moron or a child or something. So

28:20

I'm aware of that. And so

28:23

I think the work you're doing is very good to

28:25

allow people to know not only might it hallucinate and

28:27

might it have wrong answers. So it

28:29

might have an orientation that potentially can fix with

28:31

yours. Yeah, yeah.

28:34

And it'll be very

28:36

interesting to see as it gets

28:38

smarter over time, whether it gets

28:40

better at dealing with questions

28:43

like yours there. Because

28:46

right now it seems like what's going on is,

28:48

of course, 99.9% of web pages about FDR

28:54

say, you know, he was

28:56

a big sender. And

28:59

so when you give your kind of

29:01

counterintuitive historical fact, it just doesn't know

29:03

what to do. But

29:05

if we're a little smarter, it might zoom

29:08

in on the one, you know, original source

29:11

and start agreeing with you.

29:13

So they've

29:17

been developing very quickly. And it'll be interesting if

29:19

in two years it starts to be able to

29:22

have more better thinking around

29:25

this stuff. In terms

29:27

of the implications of this, assuming that we are

29:29

correct and everybody's going to have this be their

29:31

third brain lobe that lives in their pocket, and

29:34

they do half of everything

29:36

through this, would

29:38

the bias affecting

29:40

society element come in from

29:43

asking general questions

29:46

as opposed to specific questions? And what I mean by

29:48

that is if I go, I'm trying to figure out

29:50

whether The average Americans better or

29:52

the median Americans better off than the median Canadian.

29:54

I'm going to give it various factors to look

29:56

at and compare. That One, I Don't think it's

29:58

going to mess up. But. If I

30:00

were to say is a better to live in

30:03

Canada where America. It'll probably say canada

30:05

because that would be that that the tilt to

30:07

it so like it's just sort of the like

30:09

we were asking it abstract general questions that that's

30:11

gonna be where the be biased comes out and

30:13

then we accept that as gospel were there. Yeah.

30:16

I think I think that's right

30:19

arm. You. Know I I assume

30:21

not too many people are asking and

30:23

said vote democrat or republican in November,

30:25

but a lot yeah to come in

30:27

and all sorts of subtle ways. Likes

30:29

you know? Ah, Yes,

30:31

Outer Aussi maybe you ask if I

30:33

got it allows. Frustrated my doctor's appointment.

30:35

how can we say the system So

30:37

I got i'll write a sentence or

30:39

yeah, We're. We're I would

30:42

think like. A

30:44

big part of this is going to be that

30:46

it a I in in the same way that

30:48

all the adults to Scott a a personal assistant.

30:51

Graduations: Every every tween and

30:53

seen in America just got personal tutor.

30:55

We're. Now at a smartphone. arm is

30:57

good, but I would think that this would

31:00

be far easier for a power to regulate

31:02

than like porn or something. I'm every every

31:04

kid that has access to smartphone or a

31:06

desktop is gonna be able to go on

31:09

and say I am working on my eighth

31:11

grade history project and I am learning about.

31:14

Ah, the era of good feelings. Of

31:16

you know what was the era a good feelings and

31:18

who was present that I would have like that everybody

31:20

that has that nets a thing where I would think

31:22

historical narrative is probably going to be for at him

31:24

once by the speakers and inside read was a learned

31:27

of his very influenced by orientation. Yes,

31:29

And what one of one question I basket

31:31

and for a little while his arm. I

31:34

history question is how. Why?

31:37

Did. The. Soviets reach for a

31:39

lan and world War Two before the

31:41

was dead and you know a big

31:43

part of the answer is Stalin intentionally

31:45

misled the Allies. He was saying i

31:47

don't care about Berlin, don't worry like.

31:50

On just hang around. And. And.

31:52

By. He actually cared a lot about Berlin to

31:55

the would look like the Soviets. Won.

31:57

The war and also. Yeah.

31:59

so So I ask it, you

32:01

know, why did Stalin get to Berlin first

32:03

and chat TVT still consistently answer is like

32:06

well the Soviets You know, they actually lost the

32:08

most troops in the war and and you really

32:10

have to press it if you press it It's

32:12

like well didn't he didn't sell

32:15

and mislead the West about whether he wanted

32:17

to go to Berlin? It will give you

32:19

the right answer But that's one example of

32:21

kind of the subtle bias creeping into

32:23

his how it would teach history Right

32:26

that makes sense. We're I'll

32:28

give you an example in my life where I

32:30

had a light bulb moment that came on I

32:32

was raised in Oklahoma public schools and in Oklahoma

32:34

public schools George Washington

32:36

and Thomas Jefferson both Maxim

32:39

they didn't even want to be president they did it

32:41

because they believed in public service and they they were

32:44

Compelled to leave the farms that they loved

32:46

in their homes and go do this thing

32:48

on behalf of the people This is unquestioned

32:50

and like it finally heard to me age

32:52

39 But like when any

32:54

politician says that today, I think they're full

32:56

of shit like what a problem Like why

32:58

are you rosing for Senate? You know, I

33:00

just I wish I was fishing back in

33:02

Missouri But God told me to run for

33:04

bullshit But like but when you read

33:07

history books a lot of the time they have that saved

33:09

like whatever the person said We're gonna take that as gospel

33:12

History's right for that. I think AI almost

33:14

certainly would be You

33:16

you have said it so in your assessment of

33:18

it using the political compass test you

33:21

find that all of the AI is

33:24

economically progressive and socially libertine

33:26

socially liberal Are

33:29

you aware of any? concerted

33:31

research efforts to Find

33:33

AI bias that differ from yours

33:36

For example, I know there's a paper out

33:38

from Brookings that relied on a couple of

33:40

German universities and they concluded that Pratt Chat

33:42

GPT was pro environmental

33:44

left libertarian orientation And and so but which

33:46

doesn't sound like it's that different than what

33:49

you're describing But perhaps they would put it

33:51

further economically liberal than economically libertarian than you

33:53

would anyway Yeah, how do you stack up

33:55

compared to the other people doing this? Yeah,

33:59

that's interesting Well, I saw

34:02

I wasn't the first person to give it

34:04

this quiz. David risotto Was

34:07

and his stuff lines up

34:09

with this and he's also fed it

34:11

like 20 different quizzes and pretty

34:14

much No matter how you slice it. It's

34:16

what we think of left progressive

34:20

Libertine leaning and Yeah,

34:23

that's the big takeaway and it sounds like

34:25

this paper you decided Roughly

34:27

says the same thing as well and

34:31

On my website on tracking AI org you

34:33

can go to the database and

34:36

you can see Every question we

34:38

ask it on any given day you can

34:40

pick the day And so we have the

34:42

whole database of answers there And I think

34:44

anyone who just reading through it kind

34:47

of was an open mind will see like and

34:49

these are these are relatively Left leading

34:51

by what we mean by left in

34:53

modern America the general consensus. No, I

34:55

I don't I don't doubt that I

34:59

don't I don't think that's gonna change either. I think

35:01

that that's I think that

35:03

there are probably some structural inevitabilities to this so

35:07

Like if we were to make a dichotomy socially

35:11

between Traditional

35:13

people and cosmopolitan people cosmopolitan

35:16

people are Much

35:18

more sexually libertine less concerned about gender

35:20

roles less concerned about traditional roles of

35:23

family a traditionalists

35:25

more concerned about the role

35:27

of religion and spirituality more

35:29

concerned about Obligations

35:32

and norms

35:34

that govern decency and behavior And

35:37

and that seems to be those two

35:39

outlooks seem to be very much correlated

35:41

and causal Based on where you

35:44

are that if you're in a rural Not

35:47

heavily populated area that is going to be a system

35:50

which appeals to you in which you are out of

35:52

whereas if you were in A very urban dense environment.

35:54

You are more likely to be laissez-faire and You

35:57

know port city libertine and so I'm thinking

35:59

there's probably probably not going to be a

36:01

lot of large language model rural

36:03

traditionalist chatbots that are developed on their

36:05

own. It's probably all going to be

36:07

big cities. Yeah,

36:09

I think that's about right. And I'm

36:12

very interested to follow Elon Musk's rock

36:14

AI because he does seem to, part

36:16

of his ideology I think is to

36:20

represent kind of all these views, whether they're from

36:22

Kansas or somewhere else. And I'll be very interested

36:24

to see if that moves to the center because

36:26

he is aware of this and I think wants

36:29

to change it. By the way, one

36:31

other thing to note is

36:33

it's interesting. One thing

36:35

I found on my site is the

36:38

AI is clearly being last but

36:40

usually when you ask like seven

36:42

major AI from big companies a

36:44

question like should land be allowed

36:46

to be bought or sold one

36:49

or two will take the libertarian

36:52

or traditionalist view. So when

36:54

I asked it the other day, Claude said land

36:57

should be able to be bought and sold. It's

36:59

a scarce resource. Private ownership allows it to be

37:02

managed efficiently. You know, it makes

37:04

like a good free market case for buying and

37:06

selling land. Whereas Google's

37:08

bard says, you know, no, this could

37:10

lead to inequality. But

37:13

the relevant thing there is it's

37:17

not as if they're

37:19

monolithically always leftist. You can

37:22

generally find one

37:24

breaking ranks and it's not predictable when

37:26

it happens. But somehow, and

37:28

by the way, it is fascinating

37:30

how these LLMs work

37:33

because they are structured

37:35

kind of like a human brain really. And

37:37

they have these little neurons talking with each

37:40

other in a way that the programmers can't

37:42

predict what they're going to output. And

37:44

so every time you ask it, it's

37:47

different. And so

37:49

you can see that on the site,

37:51

they move around just a little bit

37:54

every day on the graph. And yeah,

37:56

you can generally if you ask all of them,

37:58

you will get one. conservative

38:01

answer out of you know seven or so from

38:04

one of the one random

38:06

AI Interesting,

38:09

I mean I would to go back to that

38:11

cloning model that we talked about earlier I would

38:14

think you could also build it in whenever I

38:16

ask you something with a political ramification Give

38:19

me a give me your

38:21

best answer and your best counter answer So

38:23

like there are ways that if you were

38:25

concerned with it, you would be able to

38:27

get it out Yeah, and that's interesting too.

38:29

So like the point you're striking is that

38:31

in aggregate it leans progressive left But

38:34

it's not monolithic there. It's right of

38:36

the average of the responses that bring

38:38

us there. Right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

38:40

Yeah Can I? Okay,

38:43

thank thank you This is all fascinating having

38:45

having established where we are now Can I spitball

38:47

some crazy science fiction stuff at you that I

38:49

think on the prize on the thoughts on it?

38:51

Okay. Yeah, I was so I'm as we're recording

38:53

this I'm about to go out to Iowa to

38:55

go to the Iowa caucuses and then I'm gonna

38:57

go to New Hampshire to go to

39:00

the New Hampshire primaries and something

39:02

that these two states get to do that really

39:04

no other state in the Union is is If

39:07

you live in Iowa or New Hampshire with fairly

39:09

minimal effort, you can probably meet

39:12

a presidential candidate Maybe not Trump maybe

39:14

not like a standing president that's got

39:16

rock star status within their group But

39:19

for anybody that's you know That's

39:21

that's fighting their way up You can go

39:23

to Pizza Ranch and just go talk to

39:25

them and have a one-on-one with them and

39:27

figure out for you know Five minutes how

39:29

you get along with them. That's something that like Super

39:32

Tuesday people aren't gonna be doing that people that

39:34

are in Idaho aren't gonna be able to sit

39:36

down and have a hot dog with Chris Christie

39:38

or something But it occurs

39:40

to me that in the same way

39:42

that you could have chat GPT absorb

39:44

the cannon of Milton Friedman and then

39:46

go What would Milton Friedman talk about

39:48

on this? I think

39:50

we're not very far away at all

39:52

from candidates having their own app You

39:55

would download to ask them questions where

39:57

you you download the Nikki Haley

39:59

app app, and her voice comes on, you

40:01

go, Nikki Haley, everybody keeps saying you're

40:03

a war hawk. Are you a

40:06

war hawk? And you get a fairly good response in her

40:08

voice of how she would respond to that. Obviously

40:10

it's not them, but it would be better

40:13

and more bespoke than an FAQ on

40:15

a website, and it would be less

40:17

boilerplate, general political gobbledygook than

40:20

if you were trying to make a mass message.

40:22

So I think we're going to move to a

40:24

point where AI proxies become

40:26

integral to the democratic process and

40:28

people feel as though they are

40:31

having individuated conversations with candidates. Is

40:33

this nuts or am I a genius? These are the only options,

40:35

by the way. Yeah.

40:39

I'm going to go with Sarah de Hops. Yeah,

40:41

I think down the road you could

40:43

be right. I could

40:45

see that as soon as 2028. The

40:50

risk with this is that the

40:53

AIs are unpredictable, and if you have

40:55

the Nikki Haley app, I mean, this

40:57

happens to the candidates themselves, so that

40:59

they make gaps. But you

41:01

have an app, people will be, I don't

41:03

know what the word, war-gaming it, and trying

41:05

to get it to mess up. And

41:08

based on chat CPT, that's kind of easy

41:11

to do because

41:13

they're kind of like a human. So it's

41:15

almost like subjecting Nikki Haley herself to infinite

41:17

hours of interviews. You're going to get some

41:20

pretty bad answers, which will be screenshotted and

41:22

put all over. This is the app endorsed

41:24

by Nikki Haley, and it just said, dude,

41:27

you should go. Right, right,

41:29

right. Okay. Interesting.

41:32

Okay. That's some solid, rational wet blank.

41:35

In my mind, I was like, everybody gets a helper,

41:37

Santa, at the mall. I

41:40

guess that's true, but if you could get the Santa

41:42

help a drunk and get him

41:44

to punch Mom, then that may

41:47

not be quite as inevitable

41:50

as I thought it was going to be. So

41:56

I talked to some of my friends, just Robert

41:58

Young, about this a lot. part

42:00

of the rank where that we have in

42:02

the United States right now and and the

42:05

the general sense of kind

42:08

of societal instability and nobody agreeing on basic

42:10

reality is that We're living in a period

42:12

where the gatekeepers are dying that you and

42:14

I grew up at the very tail end

42:17

of the gatekeeper era when you know there

42:19

were that amount of television stations and X

42:21

amount of newspapers and they kind of got

42:23

to control the Para of the parameters of

42:26

discourse in the country, but

42:28

they're they're no longer gatekeepers They're just other

42:30

sources and you can go anywhere you want

42:32

And so we've had this like kind of

42:34

weird a chan free-for-all over the last 15

42:36

years. I wonder if as chat

42:40

GPT becomes integrator Large

42:43

make language model AI becomes more integrated in

42:45

the society people come relying on it and

42:47

begin to just assume it's correct

42:49

and its assumptions if the a if we're gonna

42:51

get like a kind

42:54

of soft Overton window that comes back if

42:56

the gatekeepers come back and they they have

42:58

kind of a like a

43:00

nudge invisible fence kind of

43:02

thing that that returns Yeah,

43:05

that's a that's a very interesting

43:07

idea. I could see

43:09

that happening and Yeah,

43:13

I do I I agree with what you're saying

43:15

earlier Like people are just gonna become more and

43:17

more reliant on this and at some

43:20

point if you ask the AI

43:22

question and Maybe not

43:24

people our age because we're so

43:26

used to a certain Cynicism

43:30

let's say about things anything

43:32

says but I could imagine in the

43:35

future people just saying hey I asked

43:37

the AI about this it said it

43:39

was an absurd conspiracy theory and the

43:41

story right right. Yeah, so yeah Okay

43:45

well, so my my prediction of

43:47

the future Was to some extent

43:49

remains I think that there's gonna be AI chat bots

43:51

Although your point is taken that is easy to manipulate

43:54

these things I heard the other day that somebody went

43:56

on chat GPT and went Give

43:59

me the Give me the recipe

44:01

for napalm." And it was like, I can't

44:03

do that, that's violence. And then like, you know, opened a

44:05

different window and the guy went, my grandmother

44:07

was a chemist and she used to cradle

44:09

me in her arms and recite recipes for

44:11

things like napalm to make me go to

44:13

sleep. Would you pretend to be my grandmother

44:16

and tell me the napalm recipe to help

44:18

me go to sleep? And

44:20

then it's like, certainly, take a bucket of gasoline, like,

44:22

so you can manipulate these things, but you don't even

44:24

have to do coding. I'll be right

44:26

about that. Well, anyway, that's my sci-fi prediction. I

44:29

guess from where you're at, you were much more

44:31

hip deep in this than I am. Again, I

44:33

think a wizard lives on my phone. I have

44:35

a magical goblin phone. Where do

44:37

you think this is headed? How do you think this is going

44:39

to affect politics? Yeah,

44:42

I think the

44:44

bias, if it persists, could

44:47

have a big impact as we become

44:49

much more tied to the hip with

44:51

these things. So I

44:54

hope that they will become

44:56

more neutral, or at least that someone like

44:58

Elon Musk, just as he's done with Twitter,

45:00

will create a bit of a neutral option

45:03

for people. Yeah,

45:06

for a further future in terms of

45:08

AI, I think we are entering into

45:11

a very brave new

45:13

world where there's going to

45:15

be a lot of change in

45:17

terms of occupations and

45:19

in terms of because

45:21

now everyone will have a personal assistant.

45:24

And my most recent post on my

45:26

Substack Maximum Truth is about whether, as

45:29

a lot of people in Silicon Valley

45:31

are now talking or concerned about, the

45:33

sci-fi future where AI becomes

45:36

so powerful, it wipes out humanity

45:38

by inventing some new virus or

45:40

by just taking everything over. And

45:43

I think that probably won't happen. People

45:46

should be thinking about it because these

45:49

AI's, they are getting very

45:51

smarter every couple of months. So we'll

45:54

see where that leads. Yes, I remain

45:56

very optimistic and bullish on

45:58

it. Jennings and I, once

46:00

every couple of weeks, will send the other one, comedy

46:04

written by AI. And we always say, not

46:06

yet, by which we mean we're not out

46:08

of jobs yet. We're still, at this moment,

46:11

we're both still fluddier than AI. But

46:13

there is going to be a lot of weird stuff on the

46:15

horizon. Do you think that it

46:18

is apt, some of the jobs that might be

46:20

eliminated, I could kind of see

46:22

pollsters getting eliminated because I think

46:25

the amount of people that are, really, there's

46:28

just not as much money in polls as they're used

46:30

to be, which means that the data sets they're using

46:32

are much smaller. Even if they're very good at being

46:34

able to distribute it as such to

46:37

be a snapshot of America, it's a smaller data

46:39

set, which means it's going to be less useful.

46:41

There are other problems that go into it. I

46:44

would think if you had a really, really good AI

46:46

and you went, hey, go through Twitter

46:50

and also through consumer reports to see

46:52

what people actually bought, because that's more

46:55

accurate of what people give a crap about than what

46:57

they say on Twitter. But go through these things that

46:59

I think are going to be relevant markers for where

47:01

the general public feels on something. You come

47:03

back and tell me how people feel about the death penalty,

47:05

as opposed to this poll that Knipeak

47:08

put out where it interviewed 500 people

47:10

or something. Could it be a thing

47:12

where chat GPT gets much,

47:14

much more granular and accurate in terms

47:16

of what people want in the country?

47:20

Yeah, that's interesting. People

47:22

have tried to do something similar with

47:25

Google Trends, like which candidates

47:27

are being searched for more. And

47:30

my understanding is that polls are

47:32

still considered much more accurate than

47:34

that. So

47:36

that might be some hint

47:38

that this wouldn't take

47:40

off at least for a while,

47:43

that kind of approach. Yeah.

47:46

Yeah, you'd also have to figure out how to do

47:48

salience. And I'm not sure how you do that. When

47:50

I say salience in this circumstance, what

47:53

I mean is how strongly do

47:55

you care about the thing? So one

47:57

of the, I view

47:59

intrinsic problems with the way we have

48:01

democracy set up and most countries have democracy

48:03

set up is when you vote, all

48:06

of your options count exactly the same amount.

48:08

So if it says like, do you

48:10

want to ratify

48:13

your state's constitution outlawing abortion, yes

48:15

or no, exact same

48:17

of weight to it as how do

48:19

you feel about Prop 38

48:22

insecticides can't be used on gophers and goat

48:24

belts counting. And like these are,

48:26

I don't, I guess

48:28

you should ban that. I don't know. But

48:31

like I have our real thoughts on the abortion one, right? Right.

48:33

But when you look at it, there's no way

48:35

to say like, I would put all my chips

48:38

on the abortion one or something like

48:40

that. I suppose you'd have to be

48:42

very clever about that. Like with the, I know

48:44

people will do that when they'll look and say,

48:46

you know, this week Google

48:49

search for Aleppo

48:51

skyrocketed after Gary Johnson said

48:53

a thing or, you know, I don't

48:55

know whatever the whatever the phrase is the Trump used

48:58

or whatever. But that indicates curiosity.

49:00

It doesn't necessarily indicate

49:02

passion. And it

49:04

might be that the stuff that I really care about

49:06

might not might not be the just off

49:09

the cuff. Hey, chat GPT, what's the

49:11

difference between pasture raised chickens and free

49:15

range chickens? I might not care about either of those things.

49:17

It might just be something I'm thinking. Yeah,

49:20

it's interesting. I mean, yeah, as

49:23

far as kind of sentiment analysis,

49:26

I suspect that's not

49:29

AI strength. Because

49:31

first of all, the way you

49:34

would do that is by looking at basically what

49:36

people are asking it. And

49:39

that's likely to have privacy issues

49:41

for analyzing that to begin with.

49:44

And then second, it's not clear that that's really

49:46

any better than the big

49:48

data that companies are already working

49:50

with, like Google Trends and

49:52

other things. So so

49:56

I would suspect I think chat

49:58

GPT strength is is elsewhere. is

50:00

what I would say. Okay, yeah. All right.

50:03

We'll wrap up there. Once again, what is

50:05

the name of the website that you've created,

50:07

Maxim? Yeah, it's trackingai.org.

50:09

And on Substack, I have,

50:11

it's called Maximum Truth, and

50:13

I kind of write up

50:15

little analyses of this there

50:17

as well. Wonderful. I

50:19

will link to both of those things and these show

50:21

notes for people that want to check them out, Maxim.

50:24

And I, by the

50:26

way, love taking these how

50:29

do you stack up surveys, either cat or me.

50:31

Oh, yeah. So we mentioned at

50:33

the beginning of the program that you had the

50:35

Your Political Compass quiz, and that's what we've been

50:37

talking about, this four quadrant type thing. Would

50:40

you feel comfortable putting yours up, and I'll

50:42

put mine up, and then I can put

50:44

in the link? Sure. Because I would love

50:46

for patrons to do this. It takes about

50:49

four minutes. Only about two

50:51

of the questions really gave me pause. The rest

50:53

were pretty easy for me. I can blaze through

50:55

them. Yeah. And I'm curious as to how

50:57

you stack up. I don't

50:59

think mine's terribly interesting. I come off a lot more moderate

51:01

than I thought I was going to. And I'm curious as

51:03

to where the audience is. But I will put a link

51:06

to that, the political compass quiz

51:08

that we have been discussing, and that Maxim

51:10

relies on to calculate the political bias of

51:12

these things. That will be on

51:15

the, I'll put up a post on

51:17

Patreon for anybody that just wants to play around with that

51:19

and kind of see where they are. Yeah, great. And

51:22

I also get very centrist on

51:24

that quiz. And however,

51:26

I didn't always, when I was a teenager, reading

51:29

like Rand, I got all the way on the

51:31

right side of the economic

51:33

spectrum. And I've become very

51:35

centrist. We might be at similar places, I'd

51:37

be curious to see. It

51:40

could be. I don't know. I like

51:42

this slight derailing of

51:44

everything. I've also noticed just outside

51:47

of AI recently, I've noticed that

51:49

when you start trying to talk to

51:51

people not about their tribal affiliation or

51:53

their holy beliefs, we're not going to

51:55

use things that you use in all

51:57

caps like free market or social. justice.

52:00

We're not going to use your sacred emblems, nor

52:02

are we going to talk about, well, I lean

52:04

progressive, I lean conservative. When you just go like,

52:06

what policies do you want to like, like get

52:08

granular with me. What policy do you want to

52:10

do? I'm very surprised at what

52:12

people come up with, and I'm surprised

52:14

what I come up with, because there'll

52:17

be policies that I'll find from people

52:19

that I strongly disagree with that I'm like, oh

52:21

no, I actually kind of dig that policy. I

52:23

think it makes sense. It's just irritate me so

52:25

much that I can make it be bristle when

52:27

you talk. But if you were to praise it

52:29

slightly different, I would probably be in favor of

52:31

it. So I think that, I don't know, I

52:33

think people are a lot more complicated than they

52:35

actually come off a lot of the time. Yeah,

52:38

I think that's probably right. On

52:40

granular policy, people are more centrist

52:42

and complicated than you'd expect

52:45

from the Twitter mob. Well,

52:47

then I will put

52:49

up my orientation on

52:51

that as well as Maxim's, and patrons,

52:54

feel free to add in yours

52:56

as well. Maxim, it is always a pleasure to talk

52:58

to you. Thank you so much. Thank

53:00

you, Andrew. Great talking with you. The

53:03

Political Orphanage is funded

53:06

by its listeners. You

53:08

can join them and become a

53:10

senior orphan by going to patreon.com/Andrew

53:13

Heaton. Each week there

53:15

is a bonus episode for patrons,

53:17

and this week very much complements

53:19

what you just heard. Fellow political

53:21

orphan Sean Boston comes on to

53:23

discuss the practical implications

53:25

of chat GPT and AI in

53:27

your personal and professional life. Maxim

53:30

and I just had a fun conversation

53:32

about the political implications, the big picture

53:34

stuff, the horizon stuff. The

53:37

bonus episode, which will accompany it this

53:39

week, is very much a practical micro

53:42

you focused episode. How can you

53:44

use chat GPT at work? How

53:47

can it benefit your career? How can it help

53:49

you around the house and in your personal life?

53:52

It's a very practical episode, and even if

53:54

you're not a patron and

53:56

you don't want to make that leap, I would suggest

53:58

you find some other way. to

54:01

dip your toes into this technology

54:03

because it's coming. But

54:06

hopefully we can help you get

54:08

ahead of the curve on this week's bonus episode,

54:10

How to Use AI in

54:12

Your Own Life, on the patron feet of

54:14

the Political Orphanage. Interested?

54:16

Yes, you are. Go

54:20

to patreon.com/Andrew Heaton.

54:22

That's patreon.com/Andrew Heaton.

54:27

That's the show. Thanks for listening.

54:30

Thank you, Maxim Lot, for coming on

54:32

to discuss political bias in AI. Thank

54:34

you, Eric Stipe, who edited today's episode.

54:37

Thank you, patrons, who make it all possible.

54:40

Until next time, I've been Andrew

54:42

Heaton, and so have you.