The wokeness behind the AI curtain

The integration of artificial intelligence within the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will likely bring about swift and significant changes to our social and cultural landscape, surpassing the speed and disruptive impact of the previous industrial revolution.

Quite apart from sci-fi-inspired doomsday scenarios, the most immediate risk of AI threatens to upend how humans understand the world by changing how information is aggregated and disseminated by regulating and reprogramming the internet itself.

The Biden administration has adopted a multi-pronged approach to reverse much of the deregulation of the internet that took place under President Trump and will shape AI policy for years to come.

The administration in July successfully secured voluntary commitments from major Big Tech players including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, aiming to tap into the immense potential of artificial intelligence.

More recently, Joe Biden signed an executive order to establish new AI safety and security benchmarks. These standards are supposed to prioritize Americans’ privacy, support consumers and workers, encourage innovation and fair competition, strengthen America’s global leadership in the field, and, more ominously, “drive progress in terms of equity and civil rights.”

Rather than only return results for you to parse, generative AI will present you with what it determines to be the best answer.

Finally, the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month advanced its efforts to broaden supervision of the broadband industry. The commission, which is dominated by Biden appointees, approved comprehensive rules addressing “digital discrimination” in accord with the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021. The law mandates that the FCC establish regulations preventing discrimination in internet access based on income, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.

By now, it should be evident that “equity” resides at the core of the entire woke project. Much as the Civil Rights Act usurped the U.S. Constitution and forever altered the operations and decision-making of private companies, recent regulations and the collaboration between Big Tech and Big Government on artificial intelligence will change how we obtain information and the scope of information we can access.

The fight against “algorithmic discrimination” fundamentally revolves around determining which interpretation of reality will be programmed and who does the programming. It's crucial to recognize that this undertaking will not be impartial.

Artificial intelligence systems, such as ChatGPT and facial recognition software, learn from inputs, inheriting biases from the data they're trained on. According to ethical AI researchers, their mission is to strive to prevent these biases from causing harm to a wide range of people. But that will require limiting certain outputs.

While the left has experienced great success in programming (brainwashing) America’s youth through our education system, regulating AI programming would allow the left to control the algorithmic means of information production. That would massively influence and, in certain respects, mandate what information Americans receive whenever interfacing with technology that integrates with AI.

One example of this is through search and its increased use of generative AI in producing search results.

Search engine algorithms have always been designed to favor more "popular" results and, in some cases, exclude “non-normative” fringe viewpoints. Before generative AI, you could type in a search query and proceed at your own pace down the rabbit hole, clicking on link after link or scrolling through page and page of search results if you weren’t satisfied with the “mainstream” narrative presented to you.

But with AI, search is changing. Rather than only return results for you to parse, generative AI will present you with what it determines to be the best answer, at least according to the programmers and learning language models created by humans.

As generative AI becomes more widely adopted, the majority of individuals will conclude their inquiries with whatever generative AI determines to be the best answer. After all, the responses provided by platforms such as Google, Alexa, Siri, Microsoft's CoPilot, or ChatGPT are often regarded as authoritative. This perception is not only due to the current influence these companies wield but also because of the convenience of receiving direct answers without the need to research further.

For example, go to Google and query “What is a woman?” You will be greeted with the following generative AI results:

A woman is an adult female human. The term "woman" can also refer to:

• A person assigned female sex at birth
• A person who defines herself as a woman
• A person who is capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause
• A person who has XX chromosomes
• A person who is a cisgender woman (or ciswoman)
• A person who is a transgender woman (or transwoman)

The term "what is a woman" may also refer to:

• A 95-minute film released on June 1, 2022 by The Daily Wire
• A film directed by Justin Folk
• A film starring Matt Walsh, Stephen Hawking, and Michelle Forcier
• A film that includes attacks on trans people

While Google’s generative AI tells us that a woman is an adult female human, it also explains to us that a woman is a person assigned a female sex at birth or anyone who defines themselves as a woman.

This is programmed woke-speak.

Are there opposing viewpoints on this issue? The reference to Matt Walsh’s documentary, "What Is a Woman?" characterizes it as “a film that includes attacks on trans people.”

The concept of neutrality within a given political order and, in this case, AI is flawed because every decision or action taken by Big Tech or, by extension, a state is influenced by a particular moral understanding of what is best for society.

As we’ve already seen within this framework, numerous public and private entities, alongside educational systems nationwide, have embraced policies that endorse deeply rooted ideological principles like critical race theory, gender ideology, "environmental, social, and governance," "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and "social and emotional learning,” with devastating effects on our society and culture.

Now, these policies are poised to become programmed into the internet itself as they will be mandated by the government under a new digital civil rights regime. This regime will function as a form of informational affirmative action for the digital age, deciding what information gets included and what gets excluded.

The regulation of online speech and the dissemination of information goes beyond private company policies; it is the deliberate coordination among Big Tech firms, governments, and non-governmental organizations that are increasingly forcing woke political ideology into the very code that undergirds the internet itself.

The future is being programmed, and the revolution, far from being televised, will be algorithmically designed. As AI increasingly redefines our past, influences our present, and shapes our future, the crucial question arises: Who will hold the power to program the narratives that define our reality?