The Chatbot Culture Wars Are Here

2025/07/25 Leave a comment

Here we go again with all the toxicity and partisanship, not too mention lack of ethics and courage:

…Critics of this strategy call it “jawboning,” and it was the subject of a high-profile Supreme Court case last year. In that case, Murthy v. Missouri, it was Democrats who were accused of pressuring social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to take down posts on topics such as the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud, and Republicans challenging their tactics as unconstitutional. (In a 6-to-3 decision, the court rejected the challenge, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.)

Now, the parties have switched sides. Republican officials, including several Trump administration officials I spoke to who were involved in the executive order, are arguing that pressuring A.I. companies through the federal procurement process is necessary to stop A.I. developers from putting their thumbs on the scale.

Is that hypocritical? Sure. But recent history suggests that working the refs this way can be effective. Meta ended its longstanding fact-checking program this year, and YouTube changed its policies in 2023 to allow more election denial content. Critics of both changes viewed them as capitulation to right-wing critics.

This time around, the critics cite examples of A.I. chatbots that seemingly refuse to praise Mr. Trump, even when prompted to do so, or Chinese-made chatbots that refuse to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They believe developers are deliberately baking a left-wing worldview into their models, one that will be dangerously amplified as A.I. is integrated into fields like education and health care.

There are a few problems with this argument, according to legal and tech policy experts I spoke to.

The first, and most glaring, is that pressuring A.I. companies to change their chatbots’ outputs may violate the First Amendment. In recent cases like Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court has upheld the rights of social media companies to enforce their own content moderation policies. And courts may reject the Trump administration’s argument that it is trying to enforce a neutral standard for government contractors, rather than interfering with protected speech.

“What it seems like they’re doing is saying, ‘If you’re producing outputs we don’t like, that we call biased, we’re not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,’” Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.”

There is also the problem of defining what, exactly, a “neutral” or “unbiased” A.I. system is. Today’s A.I. chatbots are complex, probability-based systems that are trained to make predictions, not give hard-coded answers. Two ChatGPT users may see wildly different responses to the same prompts, depending on variables like their chat histories and which versions of the model they’re using. And testing an A.I. system for bias isn’t as simple as feeding it a list of questions about politics and seeing how it responds.

Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the Trump administration’s executive order would set “a really vague standard that’s going to be impossible for providers to meet.”

There is also a technical problem with telling A.I. systems how to behave. Namely, they don’t always listen.

Just ask Elon Musk. For years, Mr. Musk has been trying to create an A.I. chatbot, Grok, that embodies his vision of a rebellious, “anti-woke” truth seeker.

But Grok’s behavior has been erratic and unpredictable. At times, it adopts an edgy, far-right personality, or spouts antisemitic language in response to user prompts. (For a brief period last week, it referred to itself as “Mecha-Hitler.”) At other times, it acts like a liberal — telling users, for example, that man-made climate change is real, or that the right is responsible for more political violence than the left.

Recently, Mr. Musk has lamented that A.I. systems have a liberal bias that is “tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.”

Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that “controlling the many subtle answers that an A.I. will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.”

It’s not, in other words, as straightforward as telling an A.I. chatbot to be less woke. And while there are relatively simple tweaks that developers could make to their chatbots — such as changing the “model spec,” a set of instructions given to A.I. models about how they should act — there’s no guarantee that these changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want.

But asking whether the Trump administration’s new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether A.I. developers can actually build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point. These campaigns are designed to intimidate. And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, A.I. companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight.

”Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,” Ms. Lakier said. “I’m surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.”

Source: The Chatbot Culture Wars Are Here

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Ling | Court fights aren’t fixing our culture wars. They might be making them worse

2024/12/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

…The fact is, Canada is in a state of particular social and political polarization. That isn’t inherently a bad thing. There was a time when having gay teachers in the classroom was a deeply polarizing concept. The courts, yes, declared that legally permissible. But having Queer people in the classroom did not become normal or accepted because the courts deemed it so. That was made possible because many good people did the difficult work of convincing skeptics that it was an actively positive thing. A recent backlash to LGBTQ issues in education should be a sign that while the law can be settled, our politics rarely are.

Community is not created by a tribunal ruling or a waving flag, but by people who actively work to build it. Litigation can absolutely dismantle systemic injustice and force conversations, but there are limits to what the adversarial battles in the courtroom can achieve. 

In recent years, many progressives have come to believe they are indisputably right and therefore have no need to debase themselves by talking to those who are wrong. In the worst cases, they have come to believe that wrong-thinkers can be cowed into silence or deplatformed entirely. These lines in the sand aren’t just polarizing, they rob us of the ability to resolve actual differences. And when polarization can’t resolve itself, it can spiral into societal breakdown.

One of the ways we can disentangle these disputes is through politics. (McQuaker didn’t have to defend his record in a campaign, he was recently re-elected by acclamation.)

But more broadly, we should take some lessons from Gilbert Baker and Queer activists of recent decades. As the Queer community’s Betsy Ross told theTimes: “We have put our whole lives into changing society, but we are just starting. This is an intergenerational process.”

This process is slow and difficult, but it is important. If we rely too much on institutions, symbols, and learning modules titled “Human Rights 101” to change society, we can forget that society is other people. And other people must be convinced, not cajoled.

Source: Opinion | Court fights aren’t fixing our culture wars. They might be making them worse

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America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them

2022/04/06 Leave a comment

Interesting take. Culture wars as the opium of the people in contrast to some of the underlying structural factors:

The neoliberal order that triumphed in America in the 1990s prized free trade and the free movement of capital, information, and people. It celebrated deregulation as an economic good that resulted when governments could no longer interfere with the operation of markets. It hailed globalization as a win-win position that would enrich the west (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. A remarkable consensus on these creedal principles came to dominate American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order, binding together Republicans and Democrats and marginalizing dissenting voices to the point where they barely mattered.

Somewhat paradoxically, this broad agreement on matters of political economy nurtured two strikingly different moral perspectives, each of them consonant with the commitment to market principles that underlay the neoliberal order. The first perspective was ‘neo-Victorian’, celebrating self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption.

These values were necessary, this moral perspective argued, to gird individuals against market excess – accumulating debt by buying more than one could afford and indulging appetites for sex, drugs, alcohol, and other whims that free markets could be construed as sanctioning. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family – heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing.

Such families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in its members and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and Charles Murray were among the intellectuals guiding this movement, the legions of evangelical Christians mobilized in Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority its mass base.

The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order was cosmopolitan. A world apart from neo-Victorianism, it saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles. In the United States this moral perspective drew energy from liberation movements originating in the new left – black power, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay pride among them.

Cosmopolitanism was egalitarian and pluralistic. It rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people, and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living. It celebrated the cultural exchanges and dynamism that increasingly characterized the global cities – London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami among them – flourishing under the aegis of the neoliberal order.

The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.

The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists, and immigrants, and for stigmatizing the black poor for their so-called “culture of poverty”. The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing what they deemed to be deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference, and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph – the 1990s – was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars”. In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years.

Just beneath this cultural polarization, however, lay a fundamental agreement on principles of political economy. This intriguing coexistence of cultural division and economic accord manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the new America, one welcoming of racial minorities, feminists, and gays. He was thought to embody the spirit of the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the new left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values. Gingrich publicly pledged himself and his party to obstructing Clinton at every turn. Clinton, meanwhile, regarded Gingrich as the unscrupulous leader of a vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine his presidency.

Yet, despite their differences and their hatred for each other, these two Washington powerbrokers worked together on neoliberal legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. They both supported the World Trade Organization, which debuted in 1995 to turbocharge a global regime of free trade. Their aides jointly engineered the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did more than any other piece of legislation in the 1980s and 1990s to free the most dynamic sector of the US economy from government regulation.

Major pieces of legislation deregulating the electrical generation industry and Wall Street followed closely in the telecom bill’s wake. Clinton and Gingrich also worked together to pare back the welfare state, sharing a conviction that the tough, disciplining effects of job markets would benefit the poor more than state-subsidized “handouts”. Clinton’s collaboration with Gingrich had facilitated the neoliberal order’s triumph.

That order is now on the wane, its once unassailable principles of free trade, free markets, and the free movement of people now disputed on a daily basis. Meanwhile, public attention focuses on yet another chapter in the culture wars, with the American people divided, irredeemably it seems, over vaccination, critical race theory, and whether Donald Trump should be lauded as an American hero or jailed for acts of treason.

Yet, beneath the churn, one can detect hints of new common ground on economic matters emerging. Trump and Bernie Sanders have both worked to turn the country away from free trade and toward a protectionist future promising better jobs and higher wages. Senators Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar have both been warning the American people about the dangers of concentrated corporate power and the “tyranny of high tech”; and bipartisanship is driving movements in Congress to commit public funds to the nation’s physical infrastructure and to industrial policies deemed vital to economic wellbeing and national security. It is too soon to know whether these incipient collaborative efforts indicate that a new kind of political economy is in fact taking shape and, if it is, whose interests it will serve. But these developments underscore, once again, the importance of looking beyond and beneath the culture wars for clues as to where American politics and society might be heading.

Gary Gerstle is a Guardian US columnist. Excerpted and adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Source: America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them

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USA: The Brewing Political Battle Over Critical Race Theory

2021/06/03 Leave a comment

Latest iteration of the “culture wars:”

Last month, Republican lawmakers decried critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions.

“Folks, we’re in a cultural warfare today,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said at a news conference alongside six other members of the all-Republican House Freedom Caucus. “Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart — but by virtue of the color of their skin.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., added: “Democrats want to teach our children to hate each other.”

Republicans, who are fighting the teaching of critical race theory in schools, contend it divides Americans. Democrats and their allies maintain that progress is unlikely without examining the root causes of disparity in the country. The issue is shaping up to be a major cultural battle ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Academics, particularly legal scholars, have studied critical race theory for decades. But its main entry into the partisan fray came in 2020, when former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting certain racial sensitivity trainings. It was challenged in court, and President Biden rescinded the order the day he took office.

Since then, the issue has taken hold as a rallying cry among some Republican lawmakers who argue the approach unfairly forces students to consider race and racism.

“A stand-in for this larger anxiety”

Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, described the battle over critical race theory as typical of the culture wars, where “the issue itself is not always the thing driving the controversy.”

“I’m not really sure that the conservatives right now know what it is or know its history,” said Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars.

He said critical race theory posits that racism is endemic to American society through history and that, consequently, Americans have to think about institutions like the justice system or schools through the perspective of race and racism.

However, he said, “conservatives, since the 1960s, have increasingly defined American society as a colorblind society, in the sense that maybe there were some problems in the past but American society corrected itself and now we have these laws and institutions that are meritocratic and anybody, regardless of race, can achieve the American dream.”

Confronted by the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 curriculum, which roots American history in its racist past, Hartman said many Americans want simple answers.

“And so critical race theory becomes a stand-in for this larger anxiety about people being upset about persistent racism,” he said.

Legislative action

States such as Idaho and Oklahoma have adopted laws that limit how public school teachers can talk about race in the classroom, and Republican legislatures in nearly half a dozen states have advanced similar bills that target teachings that some educators say they don’t teach anyway.

There’s movement on the national level too.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has introduced the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act, a bill that would prohibit the armed forces and academics at the Defense Department from promoting “anti-American and racist theories,” which, according to the bill’s text, includes critical race theory.

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said he is co-sponsoring legislation that would prevent federal dollars from being spent on critical race theory in schools or government offices.

“The ideas behind critical race theory and [its] implementation is creating this oppressor-oppressed divide amongst our people,” Donalds told NPR. “And so no matter how you feel about the history of our country — as a Black man, I think our history has actually been quite awful, I mean, that’s without question — but you also have to take into account the progression of our country, especially over the last 60 to 70 years.”

Donalds said the country’s history, including its ills, should be taught, but that critical race theory causes more problems than solutions.

“It only causes more divisions, which doesn’t help our union become the more perfect union,” he said.

A post-racial country?

Nearly half of the speakers at the Republican news conference in May invoked Martin Luther King Jr., expressing their desire to be judged “by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”

But Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociology professor at Duke University, said King’s dream was about the future. “He didn’t say, ‘We are now in a colorblind society,’ ” he said.

Bonilla-Silva, whose book Racism Without Racists critiques the notion that America is now “colorblind,” says he too shares King’s dream, “but in order for us to get to the promised land of colorblindness, we have to go through race. It’s the opposite of what these folks are arguing.”

He says the idea that American society is post-racial is nonsense.

“We are not, because we watched the video of George Floyd, and we are not because we have the data on income inequality, on wealth inequality, on housing inequality,” he said.

As an example, Bonilla-Silva noted the opposition of whites to affirmative action in the post-civil rights era.

“Many whites said things such as, ‘I’m not a racist. I believe in equal opportunity, which is why I oppose affirmative action, because affirmative action is discrimination in reverse,’ ” he noted.

“That statement only works if one believes that discrimination has ended,” he added. “But because it has not ended, claiming that you oppose affirmative action because it’s presumably discrimination in reverse ends up justifying the racial status quo and the inequalities.”

Motivator for the midterms?

The fight over critical race theory will likely continue to be a heated issue ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Although November 2022 seems a long way away, Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research and a public opinion pollster, says pushback to anti-racism teaching is exactly the kind of issue that could maintain traction among certain voters.

“I think it’s just one more addition to the culture war that the Republicans really want to fight and it’s what they want to make the 2022 midterms about,” she said.

Matthews noted that Biden’s approval ratings, in the mid-50s, are significantly higher than Trump’s were throughout his term in office, “so Republicans are wanting to make this about othering the Democrats and making them seem as extreme and threatening to white culture as possible.”

“If Republicans can make [voters] feel threatened and their place in society threatened in terms of white culture and political correctness and cancel culture, that’s a visceral and emotional issue, and I do think it could impact turnout.”

These issues could be used to galvanize conservative voters and increase their numbers at the polls.

“We have seen evidence that the Republican base is responding much more to threats on cultural issues, even to some degree more than economic issues,” Matthews said.

But Rep. Donalds said the Republican Party doesn’t need to rally the base to get it to show up to vote.

“When it comes to the ’22 elections, we don’t need additional ammunition,” he said, pointing to what he views as a list of failures from the Biden administration, from budget and taxes to shutting down the Keystone pipeline.

Doug Heye, the former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said in some ways, the attempts to mandate what schools can or can’t teach highlights just how far the GOP under Trump has moved away from traditionally conservative principles — like wanting less federal involvement in schools.

“A lot of what we might have described as conservative policy five years ago, 10 years ago, now just isn’t that case,” he said. “If we’re pushing what is a current priority for the Trump base, that’s defined as conservative, whether or not that’s a federal top-down policy or not. So the old issues of federalism has really been upended under Donald Trump’s reign as the leader of the party.”

Heye said at this point, critical race theory is still politically a “niche issue” among conservative voters, but he expects it to play a larger role in state assemblies, governors races and school boards rather than in national politics.

He said he believes it’s an issue some candidates will raise “to further rile up the base that is already pretty riled.”

“So the question will be then for Republicans: What else are they really emphasizing?” he said.

From a strategy perspective, Matthews says she thinks it will all come down to messaging.

“The Republicans are trying to make it a bad thing,” she said, “but I feel like if the Democrats got the messaging right, they could make it a good thing.”

Both sides have a little more than a year to do that.

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UK: Culture wars now a proxy for political debate

2020/09/04 Leave a comment

UK perspective on culture wars and how they debase political debate and discussion:

Should those Shelbourne Hotel statues have remained in situ? Was Winston Churchill a great statesman or should he be viewed as a callous racist? Are the lyrics of Rule Britannia offensive or should Britons sing the patriotic number with pride? Are mandatory face masks a crude imposition on our basic civil liberties?

If you care about the answers to these questions you have – perhaps unwittingly – embroiled yourself in the latest instalment of the culture wars.

It seems nothing of late can escape our fervour for mud-slinging and social media spats over the cultural values we hold dear. Most recently the BBC has found itself at the epicentre of the tedious charade – with the broadcaster’s new director general, Tim Davie, reportedly believing the BBC’s comedy output is too one-sided and in need of a “radical overhaul”, thanks to its supposed left-wing slant (pray tell, what is a “right-wing joke”?).

For politicians, the answer to this question is an easy one

And only weeks earlier, when the BBC announced an orchestral-only version of Rule Britannia! would be played on the Last Night of the Proms, an almighty row was triggered over the propriety of the anthems lyrics (“Britons never, never, never shall be slaves” is the line that draws the most ire).

The BBC said the decision was due to the fact there will be no audience to sing along to the song (due to Covid-19 restrictions), while conflicting reports emerged that the conductor believed the lyrics to be inappropriate in view of Black Lives Matter protests.

In his first week on the job Davie reversed the decision and scrapped the orchestral-only version in favour of singers on the screen – in what has been gleefully described by right-wing pundit Dan Wootton as the “first major anti-woke move” by the new boss.

What is it with our inclination to reduce everything to a culture war? In the case of the Proms, what could have been a gentle dialogue about history, philosophy and patriotism is instead siphoned into a vituperative conflict between two groups: the anti-Woke brigade versus the enlightened progressives; the bleeding heart liberals versus the true patriots.

For politicians, the answer to this question is an easy one. The Proms was too good of a moment for Boris Johnson to pass up. Wading into the debate he said: “I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness”.

As the culture wars emerge as a proxy for political debate, Johnson was smart to capitalise on the row. He could signal his political values, bolster his conservative credentials (credentials that, so far, have been lacking throughout his tenure), all the while avoiding substantive discussion on his patchy track record in government.

That the culture wars can provide a compelling distraction from the substance of politics might be true but there is something more sinister going on. Johnson’s political primacy may so far leave a lot to be desired, but this is a sacrifice his electorate ought to make (he might argue). Rule Britannia may just be a song, but what the row symbolised was something far greater. Patriotism, British values, a history to be proud of – these things require protecting at all costs, and Johnson is the only man who can do it. The deluge of policy failings that might come along with this brave stance will have to be tolerated for the greater good.

Way of life

If you were to ask Johnson why he was so keen to make his case on Rule Britannia he might reply: this is not just politics at stake, but our very way of life.

The Remainer vs Leaver divide, which emerged in a meaningful way in 2015, has consolidated this notion that our politics and our cultural values are inseparable.

“Remainer” emerges not just as a position you might hold on the function of the European Union to the British State, but as shorthand for the exact person you want to present as: liberal, urban, a champion of multiculturalism, you name it. No matter that this has eradicated vast swathes of nuance from the political landscape of the Brexit vote – nuance is the enemy of the culture warriors.

As the battleground before the electorate has becomes songs at the Proms, or the cultural capital you gain by being a Leaver or a Remainer, we are witnessing in real time cultural arguments overtaking economics and policy “as the driving force of our political debate” (as Helen Lewis put it two years ago in the Financial Times).

It is unedifying at best, dangerously and myopically divisive at worst. But it seems the nation’s favourite pastime is simply too tempting (for politicians, pundits and the electorate alike) to pass up.

Source: Culture wars now a proxy for political debate

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