Disturbing Trend: Meta AI Perpetuating False Facts About Trump Shooting
Here we go again: Another election — another round of Big Tech suppressing perfectly true information and skewing facts in a way that helps . . . Democrats.
On Monday, The Post reported that Meta’s AI tool was spreading disinfo about the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pa., calling it “fictional” and offering few true details (and lots of patently false ones).
All while delivering abundant information on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
This is hardly the first time Big Tech has gotten the facts wrong, of course — but the errors always seem to favor one side: the left.
The attempt on Trump’s life, pictures of his bloodied ear and his defiant fist-pumping moments later may have won him political support from sympathizers and admirers.
But if you ask the Meta tool, it never happened.
When was the last time Big Tech disappeared positive news about Kamala Harris or Joe Biden?
Meta AI isn’t alone. The company’s Facebook platform “mistakenly” censored the Trump raising his fist, and Google’s search engine failed to bring up the shooting when prompted on its search bar.
Mere bugs in the software?
Perhaps — but it’s hard to believe that’s all that’s going on here, given that the left rarely seems to fall victim to the glitches.
And here’s the problem: The more popular these AI bots become, the more dangerous their bias.
AI chatbots are already a prevalent tool in the lives of Americans: Pew Research found that 23% of US adults have used ChatGPT (arguably the most well-known bot of the bunch).
Google now promotes its own AI bot, which is supposed to summarize topics for users at the top of every results page.
Yet it’s made legendary mistakes: It was once caught, for instance, suggesting people eat “at least one small rock per day.”
OK, no one would take a tip like that seriously.
But users may unwittingly buy more subtle misinformation as fact.
And when those facts are political in nature, they could grossly distort public understanding of the world and discourse.
Who knows how many voters would’ve switched to back Trump over President Biden in 2020 if they had seen The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Big Tech companies suppressed, calling it disinfo?
Worse, these largely left-leaning companies don’t exactly race to fix mistakes that harm the right.
Can you imagine how quickly Facebook would correct false info that negatively portrayed Kamala?
Instead, they simply release statements promising to look into the problem. And the next thing you know, someone discovers a new AI flaw promoting woke, ahistoric material, as when Google’s Gemini churned out images of white founding fathers as people of color.
Or lying about conservatives (as when the same chatbot invented fake negative reviews about Peter Hasson’s book “The Manipulators,” which is, ironically, about bias in Big Tech).
Or propping up Democrats.
Rinse and repeat.
Again, all of this muddies the waters and skews public debate and opinion.
Correctly or not, these platforms are taken as trusted sources of information (despite their warnings not to).
With great power comes great responsibility. Big Tech companies are abusing theirs.
