From the NEW YORK POST:
A conservative group is accusing the White House and powerful Democrats and liberals of scheming to “make AI woke.”
Pointing to public plans for training AI systems to be more inclusive and less prone to “harmful bias” or “algorithmic discrimination,” the American Accountability Foundation is warning in a new memo that “by taking over AI,” political ideologues “can take over the world.”
“The Biden administration’s efforts [to] make AI woke is absolutely terrifying. The prospect of AI being rigged by the Left is truly Orwellian,” American Accountability Foundation President Tom Jones told The Post.
“This is just another example of how the woke never miss an opportunity to seize power. All Americans need to know about what Biden and his cronies are up to.”
The AAF memo cites four recent Democratic public strategies as evidence of a broader quest to wokeify the nascent technology.
First is the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” released by the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy last October. The blueprint warns of “algorithmic discrimination” in which systems treat people differently based on their race, sex, or other characteristic.
To remedy that, the blueprint recommends steps such as “proactive equity assessments as part of the system design.”
“Independent evaluation and plain language reporting in the form of an algorithmic impact assessment, including disparity testing results and mitigation information, should be performed and made public whenever possible to confirm these protections,” the blueprint says.
Second is the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan released in May. Similar to the “AI Bill of Rights,” the plan warns “AI systems are prone to ‘hallucinate’ and recapitulate biases derived from the unfiltered data from the internet used to train them.”
It calls for safeguards and research to understand “how AI can reduce inequities stemming from systemic, structural, stemming from systemic, structural, and individual bias.”
That report came from the National Science and Technology Council, whose membership includes “AI czar” and Vice President Kamala Harris, who previously warned about the dark potential of racism in AI.
“It’s a real issue and it’s happening in real time. And the thing about racial bias in technology is that unlike the racial bias that you can [identify] pretty easily — all of us can detect when you get stopped in a department store or while you’re driving — the bias that is built into technology will not be very easy to detect,” she said in 2019 while a senator from California.
Third is the appointment of Miriam Vogel to chair the National AI Advisory Committee, which advises the president on the budding technology. Vogel works as the President and CEO of EqualAI, which strives to “reduce unconscious bias in our AI and promote responsible AI governance.”
“As with AI used in employment decisions, your AI programs and particularly customer-facing systems should be checked for bias on a routine basis. AI learns new patterns as it is fed new data and can adopt new biases,” EqualAI says.
Lastly, AAF points to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) recently unveiled SAFE Innovation Framework that warns AI has the potential for “supercharged disinformation” and the “amplification of bias.”
“If these efforts continue unobstructed, we will soon wake up in a world where leftist ideas and
politicians are promoted and their opposition shut down in the name of fighting ‘bias,’” the AAF memo said.
“A world where the AIs controlling who gets treatment in hospitals or who gets hired and fired make their decisions based on skin color instead of data in the name of ‘inclusivity;’ a world where anyone not on board with the woke agenda are left out in the dark.”
AI has garnered a lot of buzz with the rise of chatbots such as ChatGPT that can emulate human conversation and creativity.
Space and electric car tycoon Elon Musk has long sounded the alarm about the potential for AI to go awry and has also underscored the risks of it going woke.
“The danger of training AI to be woke — in other words, lie — is deadly,” he tweeted last year.
Last week President Biden hosted a roundtable in California with critics about Big Tech’s role in developing the advanced technology. Schumer also rolled out his proposal for regulating AI last week.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.