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Some believe that the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence are beginning to emerge quickly.  One recent mixed-case consequence of relying on AI resulted in dissention.  This happened after a researcher was involved with an interesting initiative to try and get several AI companies in talking to each other and agree on ways to cooperate; all this with the goal of possibly benefiting both the AI industry and overall society.  Below is an opinion piece regarding Anthropic’s Claude reply to a request for a collaborative campaign.[1]

This researcher decided to ask a popular AI chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, whether his entity (WhoWhatWhy) might collaborate.  He also asked two others, Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to assist.  Apparently, the other LLMs thought that the collaboration effort was fine and didn’t really have anything noteworthy to say about the idea.  But Claude did.

Wow.  Russ Baker, author of this opinion said, “let’s consider what that AI said. Claude said, ‘We (WhoWhatWhy) have a ‘fairly hard edge.’  Not quite sure what that means or whether it’s bad, though, to be fair, we do understand why it might advise an organization seeking to build institutional partnerships that collaborators might not be an automatic first choice.”

He then said, “consider this: Several board/advisory members come out of conspiracy-adjacent or deep-politics investigative traditions (JFK/Dulles history, election-machine-fraud research, etc.).

“First, most people know that board members and advisory board members typically have very limited involvement with the work and output of nonprofits.  They are on board for a variety of reasons, but it makes little sense to assess an organization by its boards — or to single out one or two as representative of some larger point.

“Furthermore, what is the purpose of adopting rhetorically loaded language like “conspiracy-adjacent” and “deep-politics investigative traditions”? What criteria informed the choice of this terminology?

Baker thought of his board of directors.  He said that there is no one who is “conspiracy-adjacent” or who comes from a “deep-politics investigative tradition” (but Baker admits, “except perhaps for me — more on that later”).

There is one person on the WhoWhatWhy advisory board (advisory boards having no power or authority or really significant input) David Talbot, author of numerous highly regarded books, including The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby; The Devil’s Chessboard, an impressive and insightful review into the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles; and such books as Season of the Witch, described as “a narrative history of San Francisco from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, chronicling its cultural revolution, violent upheavals, and eventual rebirth.”

Talbot can be affixed with the toxic label “conspiracy-adjacent” because he, like Baker, has dug into major traumatic events in this country like the deaths of high-profile political leaders and been dissatisfied with the government investigations of them.  Baker insists, “we’re [not] crackpots.”

Basically, Claude read some critiques from some “trusted” establishment source that, according to Baker, has an issue with a fact-driven, critical analysis of our country’s biggest cold cases.  The same with “deep-politics investigative tradition” which actually boils down to being interested in powerful elements and alliances and how they shape the country’s doings and history.

Baker opined that Claude has been programmed to reject this kind of independent thinking and to discourage others from being “adjacent” to it.  Which, according to Baker, is especially troubling when the subject of AI is in urgent need of original and deep contextualized thinking.

It also complained that someone on WhoWhatWhy’s board was connected with “election-machine-fraud research.”  One of its editors has spent years (long prior to joining us) looking into anomalous election vote shifts and investigating whether bad actors could theoretically alter electronic voting systems to influence election outcomes.  His investigations made it clear that, in an era where multi-exabyte-scale data breaches across distributed systems occur almost monthly, vigilance toward electronic systems is not alarmism; it is crucial.

Baker goes on that Claude was very polite about its reply and their answers often feel like an old Southern lawyer had intervened.  So, having questioned WhoWhatWhy, Claude continued: “That said, there’s a plausible thread: WhoWhatWhy’s mission around rigorous journalism that uncovers truth and puts it into context so the public can make informed decisions overlaps with ____’s ‘healing a divided nation’ framing.”

Baker stated, “so our mission is ‘rigorous journalism’; we ‘uncover truth,’ and we ‘put it into context,’ so ‘the public can make informed decisions.’ ”

One important explanation for Claude’s current caution and use of guardrails on controversial material has to do with AI’s very early (yet recent) history.  It frequently produced content that was either “hallucinogenic or poisoned” with false material, and stated as fact that which was not.  Baker claims Claude’s response to the collaboration campaign was an example of its bias.   

AI isn’t intelligent in the human sense.  Two of Baker’s colleagues explain: “Tom Neuburger calls it, ‘a dumb monger of words and recycled sentences that have the shape of ‘thought.’ ”  And Sean Ogden says it’s, “like a digital mouth that’s all teeth but no tongue; it eats everything and tastes almost nothing.”

Whatever the precise reality of how these artificial intelligence products function, we still need human beings to read, think, ask questions, and decide for themselves.  Baker says that a working human brain is a beautiful thing, and he is not sure when or if AI will be able to truly replicate a brain at its finest.  In the meantime, let’s use AI, but let’s also challenge it and do our own due diligence before accepting what it tells us.

This article is shared at no charge for educational and informational purposes only.

Red Sky Alliance is a Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence Service organization.  We have written numerous articles about AI and will continue to monitor advances and the thought provoking opinion, such as Russ Baker’s.  Red Sky provide indicators of compromise information (CTI) via a notification/Tier I analysis service (RedXray) or an analysis service (CTAC).  For questions, comments or assistance, please contact the office directly at 1-844-492-7225, or feedback@redskyalliance.com    

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[1] https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/beware-of-claude-a-cautionary-tale-about-ai/