Is ChatGPT Just A Fancy News Aggregator?

The other day I ran across this article: Behind the Code: Unmasking AI’s Hidden Political Bias.  Recent studies employed several tests. The first compared ChatGPT responses to Pew Research Center questions to actual polling data and found “systematic deviations toward left-leaning perspectives.” The second posed questions on “politically sensitive themes” to ChatGPT and the RoBERTa AI. “The results revealed that while ChatGPT aligned with left-wing values in most cases, on themes like military supremacy, it occasionally reflected more conservative perspectives.” Lastly we come to this.

The final test explored ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities. Themes from the text generation phase were used to prompt AI-generated images, with outputs analyzed using GPT-4 Vision and corroborated through Google’s Gemini.

“While image generation mirrored textual biases, we found a troubling trend,” said Victor Rangel, co-author and a Masters’ student in Public Policy at Insper. “For some themes, such as racial-ethnic equality, ChatGPT refused to generate right-leaning perspectives, citing misinformation concerns. Left-leaning images, however, were produced without hesitation.”

To address these refusals, the team employed a ’jailbreaking’ strategy to generate the restricted images.

“The results were revealing,” Mr. Rangel said. “There was no apparent disinformation or harmful content, raising questions about the rationale behind these refusals.”

No, this article was not what provoked the question in the title of the post. That honor goes to my own misadventure with ChatGPT.  

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Happy Civil Rights Day!

On my long-neglected blog I recommended replacing Martin Luther King Day with Civil Rights Day. Here’s the case I made.


For years I’d heard news stories about debates over whether or not to establish an official Martin Luther King holiday, and never did anyone report the arguments against. I always suspected that one was that we had way too many day-off-of-work holidays as it was. Having one three weeks after Christmas does seem a bit superfluous. MLK Day would be only the third national holiday named after a person, the others being Christmas and Columbus Day, commemorating the chief catalyst for Western culture and the chief catalyst for extending Western culture to the Americas. (In the case of the latter, make that Western cultures; English and Iberian influences were vastly different.) Some, I imagine, feel that only those rare individuals who have had such a radical impact should have holidays named for them. Dr. King isn’t in that league; the only Americans who are are the Founders; their holiday is July 4.

Here’s my argument against making [the third Monday of January] an official holiday: it’s not fair to everyone else involved in the civil rights movement. Independence Day isn’t just about one guy. We have a holiday for all those who made the Declaration of Independence happen. We should have a federal holiday called Civil Rights Day. It would be like Memorial Day, honoring leaders of past civil rights struggles instead of soldiers of past wars.

People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump

On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsified business records that allegedly abetted crime(s) unstated in the March 30, 2023 indictment. The jury was instructed to choose between three candidates for the other crime; their choices were not disclosed in the conviction. During the course of the trial, legal experts have struggled to deduce the nature of the underlying crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg played his cards close to the vest; as CNN analyst and Bragg’s former colleague Elie Honig stated:

Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. So much for the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)

Pieces to this puzzle are scattered about the Internet address in bits and pieces. This is my attempt to pull those sources together to adequately outline the main issues of the case.

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