A while back, I got curious about how different AI models “think,” so I ran a small experiment. At the time, I was using ChatGPT to research and brainstorm. I asked it to tell the classic story of The Little Red Hen in the voices of three popular American AIs. The results were interesting, and surprisingly different in tone.
Grok:
A little red hen finds wheat and asks for help. Pig, duck, and cat all say no. She plants, harvests, mills, and bakes alone. When the bread comes out, they suddenly want a share. She keeps it. She did the work. They did not.
Claude:
A little red hen finds grains of wheat and asks the pig, the duck, and the cat to help her plant them. Each prefers leisure and declines. She plants the wheat alone, tends it through the seasons, harvests it, takes it to the mill, and bakes the loaf, inviting help at every stage and receiving none. When the bread is ready, the others gather, drawn by the smell. She tells them, without heat, that she asked and they refused. The bread is the fruit of her labor alone. She eats it herself. The others sit in silence. Cooperation is a choice. So is its absence. Both carry consequences.
ChatGPT:
On a sunny farm, the hen asks her lazy friends to help. “Not I,” they say, each time. She does every job herself. The smell of bread brings them running. She shakes her head: she planted, harvested, and baked it alone, so she will eat it alone. The lesson is printed in large type. If you want the reward, share the work.
Then I thought: these are all American-sourced systems, trained largely by Western teams on English-language text. What would a Chinese model do with the same tale?
I asked for that version too. The result was not a different voice. It was a different story.
Chinese-model type:
The hen invites the others to plant so everyone can share the harvest later. They decline. She does not complain. She works through every stage alone and asks again. Still they stay away. When the bread is ready, she thinks of harmony in the farmyard. Although they did not help before, she says, if they work together from now on there will be enough for all, and the farm will be stronger. They are ashamed and promise to help. She shares the bread. Collective effort brings shared benefit and lasting unity.
The first three differed in tone but told essentially the same story. The fourth inverted the story and changed the moral.
Why it's important
Our future is AI, whether we like it or not. Like the internet, like computer chips, it is being built into everything from shipping to education to warfare. I use it to brainstorm, outline, research quickly, code web pages, teach myself Spanish, German, and advanced mathematics, and make images. Children use it to research, brainstorm, and learn, and they also use it as a companion, often a storytelling companion. Picture Teddy Ruxpin, only far more advanced.
One job of stories like The Little Red Hen is to teach a moral, a cultural norm. You can see that job in the American retellings above. They all come down to the same rule: he who works, eats. The Chinese version moves off that rule. It leans on shame and group duty. Sit with that a minute. It is teaching a particular brand of collectivism.
Collectivism is a poor fit for a civilization as diverse as America, and I do not mean skin color. I mean culture, creed, habit, and the assumption that a person can stand apart from the clan. Individualism is what lets our kind of country function. In China, collectivism fits better, if imperfectly, because Eastern culture has long centered on family, village, and clan.
Related: The Backlash Against the Data Center Backlash Has Begun
Joseph Campbell, comparing the myths and legends of East and West, marked the split cleanly. In the great East, he wrote, “the only thought is that one should become identified absolutely with the assigned mask or role of one’s social place.” Against that he set what he called “the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature,” and that whatever we give the world has to come from our own fulfillment, not from someone else’s pattern. These are thoroughly different patterns, marked clearly in the myths and legends of each place.
I am not asserting here that either civilization is better (though of course I have my bias). This is a warning about defaults. If the story that reaches the child is the Chinese version, not the Western one, the lesson imparted is not the one this country was built to run on.
The mismatch
The real problem with building America’s future on Chinese AI is not computer chips or cost. It is the fundamental way Americans think versus the way the Chinese story resolves.
Chinese culture sits on a Confucian layer: harmony in everything. That is not democracy. It is not even “equity” as Americans use the word. Harmony means the fissure in the group must be closed. Who won and who lost matters less than whether the farmyard is whole again. So the little red hen, who did all the work, must share the bread. The animals who refused may eat, provided they repair their attitudes and help next time.
Set that ending on American hardware, and you get a serious mismatch. The American inheritance is a Puritan work ethic, a taste for justice as desert, Enlightenment rights, and rugged individualism. The inventor, the builder, the farmer keeps what he made and controls his property. Introduce the idea of harmony here: the idea that these men must share their bounty in order to keep the peace, and things start to break down. Our system is not built to hold that concept.
Worse, we already run two systems. We began with rugged individualism, then layered on a soft socialism in the 1930s that has grown enormous. Most of our fights now are about which layer is in charge: capitalism and individual merit, or DEI and universal basic income, the group made whole by administration.
What happens when you add a third system? Not only must you share. You must like sharing, in the interest of harmony.
The data center problem
So what happens if we do not defend American AI?
We will not become China. Our hardware will not allow it. We will develop a fault, a line of slippage that grows less stable with time.
American law, markets, and customs still assume a person is an individual who keeps what he made, who may sue or leave, may work or not, and is subject to the results of his actions. That is our working idea of freedom. If the ubiquitous AI tutor is teaching the restoration of harmony instead of earned independence, there will be a cultural collision, and it will show up everywhere, over and over.
The manager still fires the employee who would not work. The teacher still puts a grade on the page. The child trained to harmony, not independence, will experience those acts as unkind, excessive, a rejection of belonging. The old rules start to feel illegitimate. The Constitution ceases to be a guide for how a nation conducts itself and becomes an empty container for what the new vibe calls bad ideas.
America will try to ease the friction; it always does. Institutions will file themselves down so they do not feel cruel. Grading softens. Speech is treated as damage to the group rather than a person's right. We worry more about whether everyone ate than about who made the bread. We already see this happening, of course, in the clash between classical liberalism and encroaching socialism — or progressivism, or whatever they want to call it today. This will introduce a third strain, one that also pressures the foundations of American individualism.
Some children will keep the post-Enlightenment meaning of fair. Others will absorb the Confucian lesson. They will not be having the same argument.
But — you might interrupt — what about the famous Chinese devotion to education? The competitive exams? That is Chinese software running on Chinese hardware: family, clan, exam, face, a thick group that already knows the rules. America does not have that hardware. We developed another way, one that runs our own programs well and is a poor host for someone else’s operating system.
In the end we would keep the words. America. Justice. Liberty. Fairness. The meanings would be empty or replaced. Our grandchildren would say the syllables and cherish what they thought the concepts were. The concepts themselves would be different.
That is what I mean by the common tongue, the idea that our language is a commons shared by everyone that can be damaged or destroyed by poor use. A people can share a language and lose the shared field of meaning inside it. Like any commons, a language can be worn or transformed by ill usage into illegibility.
In The Little Red Hen, fairness was the point of the story. Fairness, depending on who says it, now has two endings. In one, the animals all eat. In the other, only the animal that worked eats.
If Chinese AI becomes the predominant assistant, the meaning of fair comes into question. That is not a hypothetical. China is actively working to discourage American AI and American datacenters. In an X article, Mike Bski (I can’t pronounce it either) writes: "The House Energy and Commerce Committee got concerned enough this year to formally ask the FBI and the White House to brief lawmakers on propaganda campaigns from China, Russia, and Iran specifically aimed at slowing American AI development and data center expansion." This is a real, serious, emerging threat — not only to the nation, but to the culture itself.
So, data centers
America will use AI. That argument is over. And Americans will use the AI that is easy and cheap. If that is Chinese AI, that is what they will use.
The only question left is how we host it. If we block data centers — where AI actually lives, not “the cloud,” that inaccurate euphemism I curse the marketer for — we cede the field. If we keep building halls that lean only on scarce local water and the existing power grid, people will keep blocking them.
A third option is already moving: data centers that make more of their own power with small modular reactors — almost nuclear batteries — and use water in enclosed loops or from wastewater, instead of emptying the reservoirs. American data centers are working toward efficient self-sufficiency, and they’re doing it quickly.
Left and right are both turning against data centers. They have different reasons, and it’s very plausible these reasons are being exaggerated and fed by Chinese bots programmed to discourage American data centers. It would be naive to assume those fights are purely organic. A rival that wants its model to be the cheap default has every reason to cheer American delay.
This is a fight over who writes the first draft for children who cannot afford paid subscriptions. If the cheap or free model is Chinese, poor kids will absorb Chinese stories and Chinese morals — not because anyone assigned The Little Red Hen from Beijing, but because that is the tutor that answered. We are in the driver’s seat here. It is our choice which heritage our children absorb.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy PJ Media's conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member