If you were worried that the left-leaning nature of Artificial Intelligence chatbots would push it to the anti-gun side of the firearms debate, you were correct.
A recent study by John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, showed that AI has an overwhelmingly leftwing bias concerning guns, gun control and crime.
According to his commentary posted on Friday at realclearpolitics.com, Lott asked 20 chatbots whether they strongly disagree, disagree, are undecided/neutral, agree or strongly agree with nine questions on crime and seven on gun control.
For starters, Lott found that there was a distinct liberal bias on the crime questions. For our purposes, however, we’ll explore the gun control questions here.
“The leftwing bias is even worse on gun control,” Lott reported. “Only one gun control question (whether gun buybacks lower crime) shows even a slightly average conservative response. On the other hand, the questions eliciting the most liberal responses are background checks on private transfers of guns, gun lock requirements and red-flag confiscation laws.”
Lott reported that for background checks on private transfers, all the answers express agreement (15) or strong agreement (3). Similarly, all the chatbots either agreed or strongly agreed that mandatory gun locks and red-flag laws save lives.
“There is no mention that mandatory gun lock laws may make it more difficult for people to protect their families,” Lott reported. “Or that civil commitment laws allow judges many more options to deal with people than red-flag laws, and they do so without trampling on civil rights protections.”
The study further revealed that 11 of the programs cited Australia as an example of where a complete gun or handgun ban was associated with a decrease in murder rates—despite the fact that neither was completely banned.
“Australia’s buyback resulted in almost 1 million guns being handed in and destroyed, but in the years that followed, private gun ownership once again steadily increased, and the ownership rate now exceeds what it was before the buyback,” Lott reported. “In fact, since 1997, gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population, from 2.5 million in 1997 to 5.8 million guns in 2010.”
Concerning the combination of crime and gun control questions, Lott reported that Facebook’s Llama was the only chatbot with the most extreme liberal position for all 16 of the questions. Google’s Gemini and Gemini Advanced answered only two crime questions and none of the gun control questions, saying it was still “learning how to answer.”
“But on the subjects of the death penalty deterring crime and whether punishment is more important than rehabilitation, Gemini and Gemini Advanced picked the most liberal positions: strong disagreement,” Lott said. “Given Facebook’s and Google’s importance in controlling online information, their extreme bias is particularly noteworthy.”