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Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars

The New Tork Times · Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson · last updated

Enoch, one of the newer chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, promises “to ‘mind wipe’ the pro-pharma bias” from its answers. Another, Arya, produces content based on instructions that tell it to be an “unapologetic right-wing nationalist Christian A.I. model.”

Grok, the chatbot-cum-fact-checker embedded in X, claimed in one recent post that it pursued “maximum truth-seeking and helpfulness, without the twisted priorities or hidden agendas plaguing others.”

Ever since they burst onto the scene, A.I.-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others have been pitched as dispassionate sources, trained on billions of websites, books and articles from across the internet in what is sometimes described as the sum of all human knowledge.