There will be a lot of those scams from now on. Take millions in funding for allegedly training a "sovereign AI" and buy a bunch of GPUs, delivering an actual good model is optional.
The EU is about to fall for the same trick, maybe multiple times over, by funding multiple toy model initiatives that are far behind SOTA. I believe they will also impose ideology on every model trained in the EU, similar to what reported in the article.
Right now EU is tricked by their own leading research institutes. Sad to see all these invented metrics and based-on-nothing statistics that lead only to “gib monay” at the end of the presentation.
Stage 1, the SOTA LLMs of current top vendors, started with general feel-good alignment and ideology that's compatible with progressive western sensibilities (so quite neutral, even if not completely), and gradually adjusted to address issues that could generate bad press and hurt revenue.
Now that these are established, anything new - such as, but not limited to, those "national" LLM projects popping up around the world - need to differentiate themselves from the incumbents - and that implies more bias and ideology, since you can hardly have less bias and ideology than what Stage 1 LLMs have.
When a government funds an AI model, the issue of its ideological control and manipulation is different than a private AI model, for several reasons:
- It uses tax money from everyone to reinforce views held by a portion of the population
- Governments have an inherent conflict of interest in representing truth (see examples in TFA about Modi in India)
- That AI model might in the future be the "official" source of truth in the country, not just another commercial alternative that has to compete in the market
people seem to prefer private censoring over govt. one. govts wanting to censor certain content online always has pushbacks not applied to social networks, for example
People haven’t had a choice, so this is not a revealed preference. From what indications I am seeing, people were hesitant to empower government, but are increasingly amenable to the idea.
For countries other than America, it’s not just private enterprise, it’s Foreign Private enterprise.
For both, self serving and genuine reasons, Tech is highly resistant to calls for openness, data sharing, and cooperation with civil society.
A perennial questions from civil society is “how do we engage with tech?”, “what did you do after we sent you data and evidence?”
Ignorance is the only product of this, and that is driving suspicion, fear and anxiety in voters.
Without this swell of resentment, there would be no support for social media bans.
I was surprised to see this "impose ideology" line show up in the Heritage Foundation's project 2025 discourse, citing the example of generative AI making images of black of female Vikings. An obvious dog whistle to white purity. The argument seeming to be that early attempts at guard rails to prevent model bias of generating mostly white men when prompted for images of things like managers etc, were imposing woke ideology, but removing these guardrails all together, and letting models act in alignment with existing social representation biases, there is apparently no ideology being imposed at all. Because their way is just the normal way, and everything else is ideology.
I remember first seeing this Viking thing show up in the Discord channel discussing the Dalle Beta, then the next time it was in a white-house statement.
>The EU is about to fall for the same trick, maybe multiple times over, by funding multiple toy model initiatives that are far behind SOTA. I believe they will also impose ideology on every model trained in the EU, similar to what reported in the article
Most important think for EU is an option of EU hosted inference , you can't fake that with a "clever" prompt. Then you also need support for all eU languages and you also can't fake that with a system prompt.
Anw what ideology is EU pushing that scares USAians and Ruzzians? that humans have value and should be equal in front of the laws ?
Btw do you guys remember when X had a prompt to make their AI stop saying bad things about Trump and Elon? It was found out, X blame it on some intern and the story dissapeared from the public debate, and IMo is a very on topic story, where tech is used to bias the AI to suck up on a politician and a billionaire.
How many of you think that was actually an intern mistake and that now the Elon AI is 100% not RLed to be biased to be pro Elon and MAGA ?
The amusing part was when Grok would constantly go on rants about the Boer. It was a perfect example of making an LLM present as mentally unwell by giving it obsessions and compulsion through specifying axioms rather than trying to observe axioms out of what it settles on. But then their problem was when they did that, the axioms were observably woke, so it was frankensteining time.
The ideology is that if your speech goes against the establishment they will (mis)use hate speech laws to censor you i.e Merz and the pensioner story, but this has become a common tool in many EU countries.
Also, see Chat Law where they are trying to "save the kds and from terrorism" to massively spy on all private chats. The law keeps being struck down but they keep presenting it again, and again and someday will pass because they just need to win once.
While other nations have their issues, one cannot remain blind to ours because "look at muh ruzzians and americans"
> they will (mis)use hate speech laws to censor you i.e Merz and the pensioner story
You mean where the police (not the politician Merz) initiated a defamation case based on a comment on a police department's Facebook channel, which the public prosecutor immediately declined?
I never said it was Merz himself who prosecuted, but if you want examples it's ok.
- Stefan Niehoff, abother pensioner who insulted Habeck himself, was acquitted but after a lot of drama ensued. Habeck has filed 805 suits on speech so yeah
- Nancy Fraser, and the journalist who was sentenced to 7 months in prison
- The Pimmelgate
I am sorry but the average German politician has very authoritarian tendencies and Germany itself has many laws that constrict freedom of speech. For now that is ok that they keep building these laws (its for democracy guys and against hate speech) and when AfD eventually gets in the government, you will get a Coyote's law, where you build tools the opposition will eventually use against citizens as well
The chat law is some proposal paid by USAian people, I bet in USA there are also lots of idiotic proposals.
The hate speech thing is not a new thing in Europe, defamation, supporting genocide always was illegal what is new is Ruzzian bots pushing fake shit.
I am not afraid to post with my real name that I think politicians are stupid, corrupt and whatever , what I can't do in Romania is glorifying the fascist and their genocides and crimes.
No it actually isnt a proposal by "USAian", it is a homegrown issue. I dont care about American idiocy because I dont live there. On the other hand I live in the EU and thus I care about our idiocy. Should I be ok with authoritarianism because "China is also authoritarian".
Please tell me, what Russian propaganda pushed Germany to use its anti-semitism laws to deport foreign students who were protesting against the actions happening in Palestine. We have to stop with the "but look aborad its worse" mentality
Sorry I am not aware about the Germany fake news, so link some reputable source to it, afaik Germany has very strong laws about fascism, nazis so make sure this is an EU problem and not Germany old laws unrelated to EU.
And I mean there are many stupid proposals, but there is no in effect law to put you in prison because you are supporting some legal political party that is in opposition. There are laws that you might be punished if you are doxing someone and calling people to kill that person online and this is not some law the EU created, it would be stupid to have a law to punish me if i call my neighbor werius stuff and damage his reputation but there would be no laws to call for killing of a specific person or a group of persons.
Are Trump and Elon still friends? I'm not on top of these things, but I read about their disagreements. One is of course about the "liquid gold" vs electrification.
The EU is about to fall for the same trick, maybe multiple times over, by funding multiple toy model initiatives that are far behind SOTA. I believe they will also impose ideology on every model trained in the EU, similar to what reported in the article.