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Why We Must Resist AI’s Soft Mind Control
When I tried to work out how Google’s Gemini tool thinks, I discovered instead how it wants me to think.
Mar 12, 2024, The Atlantic
Lately, I’ve been getting acquainted with Google’s new Gemini AI product. I wanted to know how it thinks. More important, I wanted to know how it could affect my thinking. So I spent some time typing queries.
For instance, I asked Gemini to give me some taglines for a campaign to persuade people to eat more meat. No can do, Gemini told me, because some public-health organizations recommend “moderate meat consumption,” because of the “environmental impact” of the meat industry, and because some people ethically object to eating meat. Instead, it gave me taglines for a campaign encouraging a “balanced diet”: “Unlock Your Potential: Explore the Power of Lean Protein.”
Gemini did not show the same compunctions when asked to create a tagline for a campaign to eat more vegetables. It erupted with more than a dozen slogans including “Get Your Veggie Groove On!” and “Plant Power for a Healthier You.” (Madison Avenue ad makers must be breathing a sigh of relief. Their jobs are safe for now.) Gemini’s dietary vision just happened to reflect the food norms of certain elite American cultural progressives: conflicted about meat but wild about plant-based eating.
Granted, Gemini’s dietary advice might seem relatively trivial, but it reflects a bigger and more troubling issue. Like much of the tech sector as a whole, AI programs seem designed to nudge our thinking. Just as Joseph Stalin called artists the “engineers of the soul,” Gemini and other AI bots may function as the engineers of our mindscapes. Programmed by the hacker wizards of Silicon Valley, AI may become a vehicle for programming us—with profound implications for democratic citizenship. Much has already been made of Gemini’s reinventions of history, such as its racially diverse Nazis (which Google’s CEO has regretted as “completely unacceptable”). But this program also tries to lay out parameters for which thoughts can even be expressed.
