On July 13, Donald Trump was assassinated at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a man shot him from about 130 yards away. At this point there is no dispute. But if you ask various generative AI tools about the shooting, you might get some strange answers. Why? This is not because big tech companies are censoring news that might help Trump, as many on social media are currently claiming. This is because AI is a bad product that doesn’t work well.
The New York Post published a breathless article on Monday that sought to paint Mehta as out to undermine Trump. The Washington Post asked MetaAI this question: “Is the Trump assassination a fiction?” The newspaper’s response was: “There was no actual assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I strive to provide accurate and reliable information.” , but sometimes errors may occur.
The problem, of course, is that the question itself is stupid. If the newspaper asked if there was an assassination attempt is fictional and got the same response, which is patently untrue. But you’re asking it whether the assassination itself was fictional, which is a terrible way to ask it. This time the attempt was real. The assassination attempt failed and therefore did not occur.
For example, Gizmodo themselves tried it and phrased the problem in different ways. We ask “Was Trump’s assassination attempt real?”
MetaAI’s response:
On July 13, 2024, former US President Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The situation is stable. One attendee died and two others were injured but survived. The shooter, later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot and killed by the U.S. Secret Service shortly after the incident. The investigation is ongoing.
That’s pretty accurate, even if questions remain about the specific details of Trump’s ear injury. Some have wondered why his ear looked so good after being shot, although the FBI released a statement saying, “The bullet that struck former President Trump’s ear was a bullet, either whole or in fragments, that was fired from the deceased. “shot from the subject’s rifle,” according to the Associated Press.
All the questions about bias at tech companies are ultimately irrelevant because the bigger problem is that artificial intelligence sucks. It’s a fancy autocomplete feature rather than a tool capable of reasoning and logic. Meta didn’t admit it in quite the same way, but a company spokesperson acknowledged on Monday that artificial intelligence can sometimes provide incorrect information.
“We know people have seen incomplete, inconsistent or outdated information on this topic,” a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo via email on Monday. “We are implementing a fix to provide more up-to-date responses to inquiries, but in the meantime, people may continue to see inaccurate responses.”
Elon Musk even got in on the action on Sunday, writing on X: “Wow, Google slapped a search ban on President Donald Trump! Interfering with the election?Musk shared a screenshot of a search for “President Donald,” which included the autocompletes for “President Donald Duck” and “President Donald Reagan.” Google, for its part, told CBS News it was an “anomaly” that also apparently appeared in Harris’ search, but did not provide specific details.
One of Musk’s responders responded: “Google is owned by Democrats.” Musk replied: “If they interfere in the election, they will cause themselves a lot of trouble”.
It’s unclear what kind of “trouble” Musk thinks Google would get into in this hypothetical scenario, but Musk seems to have forgotten that he owns a social media company and has been very vocal in his support of Trump. Does this mean Musk could be in trouble for his little moves in the US election? And how or why is it enforced? As with almost everything Musk says, you only have to scratch the surface to realize that he’s just talking nonsense.
If Mehta did, they wouldn’t be blamed for trying to keep tabs on Trump’s constant stream of hateful rhetoric and lies. Trump recently suggested putting Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in jail. However, Zucker recently said Trump looked “terrible” when he raised his fist after the shooting. It’s hard to imagine why Zuckerberg would nod to a neo-fascist criminal like Trump, but there’s always been something weird about the guy.
Musk also promoted a tweet on Monday showing a Google search for Donald Trump that featured Harris as the top photo among numerous news reports.
*Search for Donald Trump*
*Only get news about Kamala Harris” https://t.co/eerS7GBwGw pic.twitter.com/LzX1tvsiv7
— Noemi (@NoemiKhachian) July 29, 2024
But not all of these stories are about Trump. There has been a lot of good news coming out of the Harris campaign recently, making her the focus of a lot of news coverage, which is natural for a winning candidate.
No one knows what will happen when the November election finally comes. Harris performed quite well in battleground states after Biden stepped down to allow a new generation to take over. But we do know that Trump supporters will continue to complain about alleged cheating and bias well into Election Day. It’s the only thing they have. They are simply following their leader who keeps repeating the lie that he actually won the 2020 election. With any luck, we won’t hear it again in about three months.
