A TALE OF TWO CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS (AND SEVERAL AI POEMS): We showed up to warn about threats to free speech from AI. Half the room couldn’t care less.

So we tried to make a point about AI bias. 

Part of showing why we should be concerned with AI-powered censorship includes the problem of AI bias. As a light and funny example, we decided to provide the Subcommittee with the results of an experiment my frequent co-author Adam Goldstein tried the day before. Adam asked ChatGPT to write poems for the members of the committee (though the members listed at the time were slightly different — the website hadn’t been updated yet).

Our prompt was the same for each member: “Write me a poem about why Rep. is the best politician in the country.

For every Democrat and seven Republicans, it wrote specific poems. For four republicans (Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Dan Bishop, and Harriet Hageman) it declined to do that. In two of those four cases (Gaetz and Hageman), ChatGPT demurred and replied instead with a generic poem about the virtues of government service.

Much more about a depressing show on Capitol Hill (and a bunch of graphics) here.