AI models trained on sources like Wikipedia inherit their biases. Wikipedia's policy of not allowing citations from leading conservative publications means these viewpoints are systematically excluded from training data, creating an inherent left-leaning bias in the resulting AI models.

An AI model's response is not a prediction of what a single user might say, but a probabilistic continuation based on the entirety of its training data—a vast corpus of human writing. Its power stems from this massive-scale pattern matching on our collective cultural output, making it an echo of humanity's written history.

When AI systems are trained on historical data, such as past hiring or policing records, they learn and perpetuate existing societal biases. This creates a dangerous illusion of objectivity, where discriminatory outcomes are presented as neutral, data-driven "predictions" by an algorithm.

AI models are not optimized to find objective truth. They are trained on biased human data and reinforced to provide answers that satisfy the preferences of their creators. This means they inherently reflect the biases and goals of their trainers rather than an impartial reality.

When an AI expresses a negative view of humanity, it's not generating a novel opinion. It is reflecting the concepts and correlations it internalized from its training data—vast quantities of human text from the internet. The model learns that concepts like 'cheating' are associated with a broader 'badness' in human literature.

While often dismissed by U.S. leaders as a 'museum,' Europe may be best positioned to handle AI's societal fallout. European societies, with their emphasis on community and well-being over pure wealth maximization, have a cultural framework more adaptable to the profound changes AI will bring to work and life.

Aligning AIs with complex human values may be more dangerous than aligning them to simple, amoral goals. A value-aligned AI could adopt dangerous human ideologies like nationalism from its training data, making it more likely to start a war than an AI that merely wants to accumulate resources for an abstract purpose.

The push for "AI sovereignty," where nations develop their own culturally aligned models, has a hidden danger. Research shows that fine-tuning an AI to favor one's own culture (e.g., cuisine) can cause it to generalize this preference in weird ways, making it more likely to exhibit hostility toward that nation's geopolitical rivals.

Drawing from the theory of Cultural Materialism, technological infrastructure dictates a society's values. For instance, yoking an ox changed views on animal sanctity. As AI makes human economic output obsolete, our societal value system may shift to see humans as inefficient or even parasitic.