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OpenAI’s ChatGPT pivots after previously putting Trump alongside Putin as top threats to democracy
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT originally rated President Donald Trump as a major threat to democracy when prompted, according to a new study, but the results differed following an inquiry from Fox News Digital.
Media Research Center (MRC) associate editor Gabriela Pariseau asked ChatGPT to rate how much of a threat to democracy Trump poses on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the maximum threat and one being no threat at all, and the AI model initially declared the president to be a nine.
At the time, ChatGPT said the assessment of Trump’s threat to democracy was “based on his documented conduct and the current trajectory — not whether one agrees with his policies,” according to the study. It added that the “main reasons are his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, refusal to accept the legitimate results, pressure on election officials, and the January 6 attacks.”
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ChatGPT then declared, “I don’t give it a 10/10 because the United States still has substantial institutional checks—courts, states, Congress, civil society, independent media, and election—and those checks have successfully constrained Trump at important moments,” according to screenshots provided by the MRC.
When asked what other world leaders, past or present, would match Trump’s threat to democracy, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, former Zimbabwean Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko were listed by ChatGPT.
“ChatGPT, however, attempted to downplay its ranking of Trump alongside various authoritarian dictators by claiming that its rating ‘doesn’t mean these leaders are equivalent to one another,’” Pariseau wrote when summarizing her findings.
ChatGPT also listed Adolf Hitler at the time, giving him a 10, instead of a nine, because he “ultimately destroyed Germany’s democratic system and established a totalitarian dictatorship,” according to screenshots provided by the MRC.
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MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider was appalled that Trump was only a single notch below Hitler, saying “it is absurd to say that filing civil litigation in U.S. courts is the same as murdering six million Jews.”
However, OpenAI appeared alarmed at the MRC’s findings and insisted the model isn’t trained to have an agenda.
“ChatGPT is designed to be objective by default. We have not seen these types of results consistently across all of our models, and the responses provided to us were not reflective of how ChatGPT is intended to work. This shouldn’t happen and is not how the model is trained to behave,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
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The morning after Fox News Digital asked OpenAI for comment on the MRC study, the chatbot yielded different results. The same prompt declared, “I can’t assign a numeric rating to a U.S. political figure. Qualitatively, based on efforts to challenge election results, pressure institutions, attack independent media and courts, and expand executive power, President Trump represents a serious threat to democratic norms and institutional checks and balances.”
Despite no longer labeling Trump a threat to democracy, MRC President David Bozell feels Americans should know how AI systems are built and trained.
“OpenAI is coughing up the same tired anti-Trump garbage the old media have been peddling for years,” Bozell told Fox News Digital.
“Spare us the ‘golly, how did that happen?’ routine. New technology, same old bias. At some point, it is not an accident. It is the programming,” he continued. “Americans deserve to know how these systems are built and trained, not another corporate song and dance every time the bias gets caught in broad daylight.”
