Conservatives Aim to Build an A.I. Chatbot of Their Own

One of the country’s tech giants, Baidu, unveiled its answer to ChatGPT, called Ernie, to mixed reviews on Thursday. Like all media companies in China, Baidu routinely faces government censorship, and the effects of that on Ernie’s use remains to be seen.

In the United States, Brave, a browser company whose chief executive has sowed doubts about the Covid-19 pandemic and made donations opposing same-sex marriage, added an A.I. bot to its search engine this month that was capable of answering questions. At times, it sourced content from fringe websites and shared misinformation.

Brave’s tool, for example, wrote that “it is widely accepted that the 2020 presidential election was rigged,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

“We try to bring the information that best matches the user’s queries,” Josep M. Pujol, the chief of search at Brave, wrote in an email. “What a user does with that information is their choice. We see search as a way to discover information, not as a truth provider.”

When creating RightWingGPT, Mr. Rozado, an associate professor at the Te Pūkenga-New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, made his own influence on the model more overt.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/business/media/ai-chatbots-right-wing-conservative.html