Was Google’s AI All About Election Interference to Stop Trump?

Google's Gemini AI chatbot became the center of controversy last week when it was discovered that the AI didn't want to create images of white people, couldn't say if Adolf Hitler was worse than Elon Musk, or wouldn't condemn pedophilia.

In the wake of these scandals, Google had a bit of a mea culpa.

“I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable, and we got it wrong,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

But the truth is, the responses were all by design. We've known of Google's woke ideology and political biases for years.

Yes, Gemini embarrassed Google, but the programming, algorithms, and AI training that led to this was not only rooted in woke ideology but motivated by the company's desire to influence elections against Republicans.

More specifically, to stop Donald Trump.

According to a new report from Michael Shellenberger at Public, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the catalyst for using biased AI to counter the "misinformation" that led to Trump winning.

One Google executive nearly started crying when recounting that Trump won. “It was this massive kick in the gut that we were gonna lose,” she said. “And it was really painful.”
Pichai struck a more neutral political tone in comparison to his colleagues. “We are in a democratic system,” he said. “I think part of the reason the outcome ended up the way it is is [because] people don't feel heard across both sides.”
But after a Google employee suggested that Trump won due to “misinformation” and “fake news coming from fake news websites being shared by millions of low-information voters on social media,” Pichai specifically pointed to the use of artificial intelligence to achieve the aim of countering “misinformation.”
“I think our investments in machine learning and AI is a big opportunity here,” he said. Machine learning is a form of AI.

At this point, Google was already using algorithms to manipulate search results. “There are many, many places where we are ranking,” Pichai said, “we are algorithmically doing stuff... understanding some of the things that are happening, and course correcting.”

Pichai suggested that there was a technological solution to "correct" the information that Google executives were convinced contributed to Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton.

"This is a problem of scale and not being able to keep up," Pichai said. "Human systems fail in many of these things. So I think investing more in machine learning and AI could be one way we actually make progress.”

Much of the demand for anti-racism comes from within Google. “Speaking to white men,” said a white male Google employee in November 2016, “there's an opportunity for you right now. to understand your privilege in the society. Take the opportunity to go through the Bias-Busting training. Read about privilege. Read about the real history of oppression in our country.”
The Google executive, who nearly started crying, said, “I think the main thing I just wanted to say is give yourself time and space to deal with whatever you're going through. Healing is a process, and it takes time. But one thing that makes Alphabet at Google so special is this term I heard, I'd never heard it before I got here, which is, this is a place where you can bring your whole self to work.”

These are the people who are creating AI to shape the public's views and interfere with elections.