Almost immediately after OpenAI’s ChatGPT thundered onto the scene late last year, commentators on the Right started blasting the world’s most famous AI as “woke.” But what does that really mean? Is this true? What is the reason?
To be clear on where I’m coming from, I certainly do not dismiss complaints of left-wing bias out of hand. I am not at all hostile to conservatism. But neither would I consider myself a member of the Right like the average American Mind reader—I’m more of a friendly critic than a fellow traveler. In that spirit, let me offer my best effort at an informed assessment of what’s actually going on here, with as much empirical grounding and as little emotional investment as possible.
I will do my best to keep us from using the W word. In its journey from appreciative African-American slang to verbal tic of right-leaning culture warriors, “woke” has become a term too subjective to be illuminating. But the common thread among the critics using it was a belief that the chatbot’s outputs skew more to the political left than to the right.
This was initially almost undisputed. Researchers from across the spectrum showed that ChatGPT tends to answer in a broad way.
