As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful by the day—Meta Platforms just released its latest model—an important question grows more pressing: Whose values should it embody?
On one end of a spectrum of debate that maps roughly to America’s contentious politics are companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. For a host of reasons both reputational and legal, these tech giants are carefully tuning their AIs to avoid answering questions on sensitive topics, such as how to make drugs, or who is the best candidate for president in 2024. When these systems do answer questions about contentious issues, they tend to give the answers least likely to offend users—or most of them, anyway.
Such fine-tuning of today’s most powerful AI models has led to a number of controversies, and accusations that they are biased. The most recent and memorable: in February, Google was forced to shut down its AI’s ability to generate images of people, after an outcry over how that system handles race in historical images.
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