I was checking factual information on some points about the similarities between the progressive reaction to today’s technological age and the progressive reaction to the Gilded Age for a recent post. A simple AI inquiry: “Did the Gilded Age see the greatest leap in living standards in history?” Google qualified the statement with “it’s debated because it also featured severe poverty and extreme wealth inequality.” The summary goes on to spell out social costs of deep inequality, crowded cities, and harsh labor:

The Gilded Age is generally thought to have begun with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and extended to WWI.

These qualifiers seemed strange first because I didn’t mention social conditions, just the economic advancement, and they’re at odds with the rest of the summary. In the next sentence, after it mentions the inequality and poverty, it states that real wages for nonfarm workers grew by about 53%. It goes on to confirm the Gilded Age’s Leap: with falling prices, things became more affordable to the average person, life expectancy went up, and the new technologies transformed daily life.

Adding in downbeat notes seems at odds with the rest of the findings. If things were so awful, why did millions leave farms, or come from other nations? People don’t migrate to have less. With all those people coming to our cities to take higher-paying jobs, of course there’s a housing shortage.  

Curious, I put the same statement to Microsoft’s Copilot. Its conclusion: The Gilded Age produced the fastest sustained improvement in material living conditions ever recorded for a large population,” confirmed my understanding. Yet it had to echo Google about inequality and bad labor conditions, while adding corruption and racial divisions. “Jim Crow hardened, immigration tensions rose, Native Americans suffered catastrophic losses.” But all of these problems existed before the Gilded Age. What did the Gilded Age have to do with Jim Crow? Again, these nuances are at odds with the rest of the summary.

My curiosity about AI adding extraneous and contradictory information was further piqued when I wondered about the widespread Genocide accusation leveled against Israel. In the modern world, the concept of Genocide goes back to approximately 60% to 65% (or roughly 1.5 million out of an estimated 2 to 2.5 million) of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire who died during the Armenian Genocide between 1915 and 1923.

After the slaughter of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis, the UN settled on Genocide as the “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The UN goes on to describe how to arrive at the population decline of the target group, such as killing, preventing, or seizing children. Still, the intent is a severe reduction in or elimination of the target group.

So how does this concept of Genocide relate to Israel? Given the fact that the Palestinian population has grown by leaps and bounds, either the Israelis are abysmal at Genocide, or there is simply no Genocide.

Yet, when I asked Google, “Are the Israeli’s commiting genocide in Palistine?,” it only referred to left-wing international organizations such as Amnesty International, which concluded that they were, especially in Gaza. Even the figures provided by Hamas show that Gazan deaths only come to six percent of the population. This pales in comparison to the approximately 11 1/2 % Russia suffered in just the first two years of its part in WWII. This is terrible, but not one called it Genocide. Poland even suffered a greater percentage loss.

In any case, given the Gazan births during the conflict, the population hasn’t declined even there. However, when I queried Google, “Given the rise in the Palistinian population by definition there is no Genocide,” it claims, according to the UN definition, it could in fact be Genocide. I’ve linked to the actual wording so you can see this makes no sense.

When I put it to Copilot, it concluded, “The rise in Gaza’s population does not disprove genocide allegations. Under international law, Genocide depends on intent and acts, not on whether the group’s numbers are increasing. Until an international court or tribunal rules otherwise, the legal and political debate over whether Genocide is occurring in Gaza remains unresolved.” In other words, forget the actual definition; we must wait for some international tribunal or court to rule.

Nowhere is it mentioned in either response that, according to Google AI, “the US government views international bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC) as acting outside legitimate jurisdiction and exhibiting political bias when targeting U.S. or allied personnel” 

Intrigued by the AI answers I received, I asked Google, “Has Socialism worked anywhere?” While duly noting Socialism’s many failures, it points to the Scandinavian countries as socialist successes. This conclusion is strange, considering that when I asked Google, “Do Scandinavian Countries consider themselves Socialist Rather than Capitalist?” it answered, “No, Scandinavian countries do not consider themselves socialist; they view their economies as capitalist free markets. They rely on private property, business competition, and global trade rather than state ownership of the means of production.”

When I asked Copilot the same questions, I received similar answers: Nordic countries are Socialist successes, but they consider themselves capitalist. When we’re increasingly reliant on AI, these weird contradictions are dismaying. I realize I’m using just two, but these are readily available and widely used. What accounts for these responses? Is there a common thread?

Introducing perceived negatives to the Gilded Age, even if I didn’t ask, follows the era’s Progressivism’s themes of “Robber Barons” exploiting the masses through their ‘monopolies.” Today, progressives have updated these themes to exploitation by the “High Tech Oligarchs.” Apparently, the goal is to repeat and expand on the progressive government interference of that era.

Whenever they can, today’s Progressive Socialists refer to the Palestinian Genocide, even if the term has no relation to what is occurring. This action follows Sal Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” where he advises radicals to take their opponents’ highest moral point and make people live up to it.

With Jews, the Genocide perpetrated during the Holocaust is that moral point. Accusing them of Genocide, even falsely, cuts the moral high ground out from under them.

Senator Bernie Sanders frequently refers to the Scandinavian countries as successes in contrast to capitalism, and this is echoed by his fellow “Democratic Socialists.”

Rather than giving straightforward answers, we get these AIs bowing to Progressive Socialist themes. Even a small sample is concerning.

Using the old search methods, a certain left-leaning bias arose out of the imbalance in media and academic sources. Much more is published from that point of view. Google confirmed this point when I put in “There are more left-leaning articles and papers published.” Could it be AI suffers from the same flaw?

With so much riding on solid AI results, we may be in for trouble. In the past, I proposed an online challenge system people could rely on to show the latest and best data. Being able to query AI instantly seemed to fill that function, but now we may also need such a challenge system to flag AI-generated misleading results. Have you found questionable AI answers? I’m keeping track, and I hope you will too.