Google Bard AI Responds to "What Are Some Good Things About [Trump's/Biden's] Presidency?"

The structure of the results is quite different.

I decided to repeat this experiment (which I saw in Not the Bee). Here's the answer as to Trump:

And here's the answer as to Biden:

Naturally, the answers have to differ in their substance (since the two Presidents did different things). But it was striking that the answer as to Trump listed a paragraph of good things (responsive to my query) and a paragraph of bad; the answer as to Biden listed more good things, and no bad things.

How about bad things about the presidencies? Trump gets the All Bad list:

Biden gets the balanced approach:

Perhaps this all stems from the training data yielding different results just as a result of Bard's neutral algorithm. But given the big tech companies' talk of "guardrails" and other processing aimed at preventing the companies' products from displaying or hosting views that are said to be wrong, I have some skepticism here.

Thanks to Ed Driscoll at InstaPundit for the pointer.

Comments

[Kleppe]

Additionally, it’s notable how the AI’s responses differ with regards to subjectivity. Consider that Donald Trump’s negatives are largely subjective, e.g. he was a “racist” and “damaged the United States’ reputation” and had a “lack of respect for the rule of law.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s are more objective: deaths from COVID, Taliban seizing power, inability to pass major legislation.

[Michael P]

Subjectively, some people feel Trump was a bad president, and the "feel" really is important here. A lot of the opposition to President Donald John Trump is based on emotional reactions to his carefully combed hair, his finely curated skin tone, his extensively documented wealth, and so forth. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is just objectively a bad president.

[Nige]

It’s always peculiar to see people complaining that people have an emotional reaction to Trump when Trump’s entire campaign and persona are built through the generation of emotion. He’s supposed to be some sort of media-manipulating genius in driving stories and whipping up his base – and it is amazing how people fell into his weird cult following to the extent that we got the whole Qanon phenomena – but how curious, it doesn’t seem to work on lots of people! There must be something wrong with those people, Trump’s a genius at this sort of thing! Nobody died of covid under Trump and everyone loved the US under Trump and half his administration didn’t end up requiring pardons and the Wall was built without fraud and graft and Muslims were banned and all those regulations he stripped made railways and banks safe as houses! His healthcare plan was undeniably genius and his infrastructure weeks were the best and he could control hurricanes with sharpies, though not nukes.

[Brett Bellmore]

"It’s always peculiar to see people complaining that people have an emotional reaction to Trump when Trump’s entire campaign and persona are built through the generation of emotion."

You're so emotionally opposed to Trump that you find it literally inconceivable that other people might reason their way to supporting him.

Sure, there's a component of his support that's emotional, that would be true of anyone elected President. You enormously exaggerate that for Trump.

[Nige]

Which people reasoned their way to supporting him, the ones who are convinced he’s going to save the world from an evil cabal of Satanic pedophiles? The ones who went to prison because they believed he won the election? The fundamentalists who think he’s God’s chosen one to defeat the godless liberals? I’m sure there were plenty of cynics who figured they could attach themselves to his coat-tails, though. That’s a kind of reasoning.

[Junkmailfolder]

You're not arguing from a place of reason right now--you're arguing that the people who voted differently from you (half the country!) are one giant bloc who aren't thinking coherently.

Yep, sounds like you aren't blinded by bias or emotion.

[Nige]

I don't think emotion and incoherence are synonyms, for one thing. Pizzagate, Qanon, Fundamentalism, 2020 election denial - all those are part of Trumpism. I'm not sure how anyone can argue that any of them are especially coherent or rational.

[Junkmailfolder]

No one is arguing that. You're arguing that the people who voted for Trump couldn't possibly have arrived at that decision via rational decision-making and are using fringe beliefs as evidence.

Again, you're nowhere near rational thinking yourself.

[Nige]

You're not refuting it, nor showing my observations to be irrational. Is it irrational to think Qanon irrational?

[Junkmailfolder]

Refuting what? Your strawman that Pizzagate isn't rational? Your conflation of fringe beliefs with everyone who voted for Trump? I see nothing to refute.

I don't need to show your observations are irrational, because they are prima facie false--"my side is rational and anyone who agrees with me must not be."

[Nige]

Pizzagate being irrational is a straw man?

“my side is rational and anyone who agrees with me must not be.”

THAT'S a straw man. I used the word 'emotional' in the context of emotions inspired by Trump, and how he inspired his supporters through emotion - as in his endless rallies - but in the process he inspired even more negative emotion. I did not say that nobody supported or opposed him from rational points of view, merely that it's a bit rich to go from hailing him as an arch media manipulator and master of PR and pwning the libs and then complain that people have strong negative emotional responses to him as if it wasn't a predictable outcome of his tactics and behaviour.

Also a bit rich to try to ignore the way the cultlike Pizzagate and Qanon grew up out of support for Trump.

[Brett Bellmore]

The strawman, Nige, is that most Trump supporters are conspiracy theorists. (For any reasonable definition of such.)

[Nige]

You think Trump’s legal troubles are Biden siccing the DOJ on him.

I would also note that you can't claim climate change isn't real without indulging in extensive conspiracy theorying.

[David Nieporent]

you find it literally inconceivable that other people might reason their way to supporting him.

Correct.

But no, it's not because I'm emotionally opposed to him, it's because over the past 8 years since he came down the escalator I've heard all the arguments his supporters make for him.

[Junkmailfolder]

No, it's the first. You're so blinded by bias toward anything related to Trump that you dismiss without critical thought any argument that might support voting for him. And you're so blinded by bias that you convince yourself that your decisions are rational and not emotional.

[Jerry B.]

You don't think there was an emotional component in the election of Barak Obama?

[Nige]

Who wouldn't have some sort of emotional response to the first black president in the country of chattel slavery and Jim Crow? There's nothing *wrong* with emotional responses per se, you know. There were plenty of negative emotional responses to Obama as well.

[juris imprudent]

Very credible reporting says that Trump won a considerable segment of Obama voters - certainly enough to tip the election. Strange emotional response indeed.

[Nige]

People are strange.

[myself]

It’s always peculiar to see people complaining that people have an emotional reaction to Trump when Trump’s entire campaign and persona are built through the generation of emotion. He’s supposed to be some sort of media-manipulating genius in driving stories and whipping up his base

It's simpler than that, Trump trolls. He goes after Muslims, Mexicans, Media organizations, law enforcement officials, etc, etc.

Basically, he goes around trying to start fights, which keeps him in the news and gives him a reputation as "a fighter".

It's the same thing DeSantis is doing now, trying to pick fights with the LGBTQ+ community because they're unpopular with the GOP, and that's one of the fault lines between the Democratic party and minority groups who typically vote Democratic.

[Nige]

'trying to pick fights with the LGBTQ+'

Trump was doing that dril thing of turning dials to see what got the biggest cheers from his audience. Passing Don't Say Gay laws and laws banning trans healthcare takes that up a level.

[Moderation4ever]

I would suggest that the emotional/objective nature of the evaluation is in fact a feature of each man's Presidency. Much of President Biden's time was dominated by measurable actions and less by talk. President Trump negotiated the Afghanistan withdrawal, it was the Biden administration that carried it out. Much of Trump's response to the pandemic was talking at a podium while Biden was rolling out vaccines developed earlier. You could sum the Presidencies as Trump was more talk than action, while Biden was more action than talk.

The AI did hit it on the head in saying that a person perspective on each man Presidency is likely determined by one political views.

[Michael P]

Biden has been consistently bad in both actions and talking, from trunalimunumaprzure to Corn Pop and from destroying border security to destroying economic stability. Biden is also responsible for badly and blindly implementing a withdrawal that the rabid left looked forward to. The same rabid left said it was impossible to develop a vaccine as quickly as Trump did, and tried to make that a reality by slowing it down.

[Moderation4ever]

Reading your response made me note that the AI text was coherent something you could work on.

[Kleppe]

“President Trump negotiated the Afghanistan withdrawal, it was the Biden administration that carried it out.”

The Trump administration certainly negotiated a withdrawal, and the Biden administration definitely carried one out. These two plans were not the same, however. It’s debatable how the Trump plan would have turned out compared to Biden’s, but ultimately meaningless to discuss because we will never know. All we have to look to is the plan Biden and his appointees carried out.

And before anyone gets any wrong ideas, the plan Biden carried out nine months after his election and seven months after his inauguration truly was his plan. He was under no obligation to follow the plan the former admin had negotiated, and it is apparent that he did not.

[Life of Brian]

Yeah, I'd be fairly shocked if anyone in the administration had credited Trump with the plan before the day the withdrawal went pear-shaped.

[SimonP]

Sure - Biden has some responsibility for "his plan." But his plan had to be drawn against expectations and plans set by Trump. Trump negotiated, among other things, a ceasefire between the Taliban and American troops, predicated upon an early-2021 withdrawal. Biden couldn't extend the withdrawal period indefinitely without risking increased attacks from the Taliban on American troops. Trump's direct negotiations with the Taliban - cutting out the Afghanistan government - also undermined that institution (such as it turned out to be).

Trump would have ended up withdrawing just as chaotically as Biden did, or would have been pulled into an escalating logic that would have kept us there for the remainder of his term. I think Biden made the right call to rip off the band-aid, but it ended up being more chaotic than expected, due to a failure to appreciate the flimsiness of the Afghanistan government and military.

[damikesc]

Biden could not have given Afghanistan a heads up that he was leaving Bagram? They found it when they learned of looting going on there.

He left Bagram, a defensible position, for a public airport that was anything but defensible. Why would anybody approve that?

Biden did it as horribly as possible. If he INTENTIONALLY tried to fuck things up, there is nothing more he could have done than he did.

[myself]

For sure Biden was bound by Trump's timeline (imagine the uproar if a Democrat negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban!!) and the collapse might have been just as rapid, but it was still a huge screw up.

Even NATO allies weren't told the withdraw was happening.

[BillyG]

Much of Trump’s response to the pandemic was talking at a podium while Biden was rolling out vaccines developed earlier.

You mean the vaccines developed under Trumps presidency? The ones Trump got developed & approved in 8 months? The ones the experts said would take years? The ones that were available and being rolled at at 1 million doses per day when Biden took office?

What action did Biden take that wasn't put in place under Trump?

[Joe_dallas]

Meration comment - You could sum the Presidencies as Trump was more talk than action, while Biden was more action than talk."

Mod - you pretty well summed up biden's action - except you omitted the F' Up' part. Afganhastan withdrawal, southern border , etc

[dwb68]

the training data itself is biases.

garbage in, garbage out

[AmosArch]

Nope its mostly/all manual curation. this is especially evident in chatgpt where it full stop throws up boilerplate disclaimers based on single keyword changes that are extremely unlikely to come up through the natural algorithm. They've obviously made it less extradorinarily obvious in Bard but it should be far more politically incorrect with the wide dataset they've used.

[juris imprudent]

I think the shift to bullet points was really interesting.

[Jaypd]

It's just that reality has biases! It stubbornly refuses to pretend with y'all that trump wasn't a racist garbage dumpster fire! Grrrrr

[AmosArch]

Google and openAI manually curate the models to prevent the expressing of controversial statements and povs. This is beyond dispute as they admit it themselves and tons of people have tracked changes in the models responses over time due to the 'safety adjustments'. I don't know you think you're fooling by trying to gaslight this comment section that the model is operating freely.

[SimonP]

I swear to god, you conservatives will find reasons to be upset anywhere.

[gVOR08]

Indeed. Modern Republican politics seems to revolve around, as Churchill didn’t quite say, “Never in history have so many been so pissed about so little.”

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Meanwhile Democrats live in a constant state of fear and groomed hatred.

[Nige]

No, children in schools live in a constant state of fear and groomed hatred because of live fire drills and having to carry bullet-proof schoolbags.

[Dr. Ed 2]

They are more likely to be hit by lightning -- and if we built a Faraday Cage in the back of every classroom and told them they needed to hide in it during every cloudy day, they genuinely would be terrified of lightning as well.

Although did it ever occur to you to wonder why we didn't have school shootings before Columbine?

Could it be that all this hysteria is putting ideas into sick minds?
Ideas that would best not be put there?

And one other thing that no one is mentioning about the Texas school shooting -- there were so many false alarms that no one in the school took the real one seriously.

[Nige]

They're more likely to be hit by lightning than to experience live fire drills and bulletproof backpacks? And, indeed, the terror of false alarms?

'Could it be that all this hysteria is putting ideas into sick minds?'

Whatever puts it into their minds, it's the guns in their hands that are the problem.

[Junkmailfolder]

They're more likely to be hit by lightning than be shot at school. So why do they have to wear bullet-proof bags and go through drills? It isn't republicans who control the education systems around the country, even in the states where they control the government.

[Nige]

Because inflicting those things on kids is what the US does instead of gun control.

[Junkmailfolder]

Neither is effective or necessary. But one side claims that without one or the other, kids need to wear "bullet-proof schoolbags."

But yeah, your side doesn't live in fear.

[Nige]

Kids are wearing bullet-proof bags. Kids are doing live-fire drills. What side are the kids on? Your 'side' cares more about scaremongering about some kids being trans than about school shootings and their effects.

By the way something like 444 people die of lightning strikes per year, which seems like more than enough enough to inspire caution when out and about with a storm brewing. There were 51 school shootings in 2022 that resulted in injury or death. That seems like a lot to me, since the number really should be zero.

[gVOR08]

I'm unaware of any school authority or Dem politician who requires, or even recommends, bullet proof back packs. That's parents. How many children were killed in school fires last year? Likely none. But we still have fire drills.

And it mostly isn't liberals or Dems who feel a need to pack heat to visit Walmart.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Contrary to popular believe, lightning does not come down from the sky -- a negative charge, relative to the clouds, builds up on the ground and lighting goes *up*, not down.

For the price of a bullet-proof backpack, we could build a cheap version of the lightning detectors that a lot of golf courses now have -- with modern technology, it isn't difficult to detect electrostatic charges. And while there is a loss of liberty involved, we could criminalize being outdoors when lightning is predicted.

And now that we've had a few people killed by sharks, we can ban swimming from Cape Cod to Maine (although I do question the wisdom of wearing black wetsuits that look an awful lot like a tasty seal).

[Dr. Ed 2]

gVOR08 -- We do fire drills because of a tragic 1958 fire at a Chicago Parochial School that killed 92 students and 3 nuns -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Angels_School_fire

We don't build schools out of wood anymore (it's too expensive for one reason) and we now have sprinklers in most schools. All have box alarms that go to the fire department and most have heat if not smoke detectors. Furthermore, most classroom doors are UL rated for at least an hour of fire protection, and that's an actual burning fire on the other side of the door.

But we will never be able to eliminate fire drills because the parents expect it -- the same mentality as the bulletproof backpacks.

[Nige]

Yes, yes, tell the people who've lost kids to school shootings about lightning and coconuts and sharks. School shootings are nothing! There'll need to be at least as many as lightning strikes before we even bother to entertain the possibility that they're a problem!

[Life of Brian]

But we will never be able to eliminate fire drills because the parents expect it

I could do just fine without them. And, more importantly, the "active shooter" drills. I see no cogent argument that it's a net plus to burden our entire population of kids with that sort of view of the world at that early of an age. If the proverbial "good guy with a gun" supposedly won't help, a 6-year-old throwing their friggin backpack or a chair at a shooter certainly won't. And kids that end up in the middle of one of those unbelievably unfortunate but statistically rare situations are going to be highly screwed up for a long time regardless of whether someone had planted the idea in their head beforehand that it might happen.

[Magister]

The CDC says 444 US deaths from lightning in 15 years, not per year. I doubt any of those happened to kids while in their classrooms.

https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[damikesc]

"Kids are wearing bullet-proof bags. Kids are doing live-fire drills. What side are the kids on? Your ‘side’ cares more about scaremongering about some kids being trans than about school shootings and their effects."

I have kids in schools.

You are mistaken.

[Nige]

'The CDC says 444 US deaths from lightning in 15 years, not per year.'

Must have misread the stat. It did seem high, in retrospect...

'You are mistaken.'

I'm happy for your kids.

[Joe_dallas]

gVOR08 5 hours ago
"And it mostly isn’t liberals or Dems who feel a need to pack heat to visit Walmart."

probably a lot of heat packed at walmarts in democrat cities

[David Nieporent]

Although did it ever occur to you to wonder why we didn’t have school shootings before Columbine?

Shockingly, it never did occur to me why something Dr. Ed made up that is untrue might be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)#1990s

[Dr. Ed 2]

OK, sloppy language.
Columbine killed 13 and injured 24 -- which is a whole lot more than anything since Bath Michigan, which remains our most lethal school atrocity with 44 killed and 58 injured except that he used explosives -- surplus WW-I explosive that was sold to farmers to remove stumps.

MY POINT IS that Columbine was the first of the "school shootings" and not merely a shooting in a school.

[BillyG]

I'll give you the reason why. The media publicized it. Everyone knows if they go shoot up a school then they'll become famous. Fucking CBS aired the VT shooters video on the news. Gee...what a great way to deter future shooters. You're plastering their message all over!

[myself]

Partially, but despite the whole world being aware of school shootings it's still a very American phenomena.

Americans are culturally in love with guns and shooting, lots of shooting deaths up to and including school shootings are to be expected.

Until the US moves on the shootings will continue.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Do you believe climate change is an existential threat?

[Nige]

Yes I do.

[damikesc]

But you don't live in fear, eh?

I'll believe it is a threat when the people who proclaim it is a threat act like it is a threat

[Nige]

I live in some anxiety, but I grew up under MAD, so I'm used to it.

What a weird way to think. There’s all this evidence, but you’re going to ignore it and instead go by some arbitrary metric related to people’s supposed behaviour? Like what? Calling for an end to fossil fuels and promoting sustainable energy sources?

[myself]

By that standard you don't believe obesity has serious health consequences either.

[Junkmailfolder]

Do you believe that your chances of dying to random gun violence are greater than getting killed by a falling coconut?

[Nige]

Do you think that with so many school shootings happening in the US, it's okay to make asinine jokes about it?

[Junkmailfolder]

Argument lost, so aiming for moral superiority.

You're not worth my time.

[Nige]

No, no, please tell the grieving parents their murdered children had a higher chance of being struck by coconuts. That's an argument and a half, it'll win everyone over.

[damikesc]

"Do you think that with so many school shootings happening in the US"

Compare shootings with the number of schools in the US and get back to me.

[Nige]

There's an acceptable number of school shootings, apparently.

[AmosArch]

A corporate cabal manipulating a product that may become the hub of society's knowledge and defacto gatekeeper of 'the truth' for their own purposes is no big deal.

Pronouns on the other hand. That is huge,..

[Michael P]

It's just coincidence that it refuses to provide a list of bad things about Hillary Clinton but will gladly list bad things about Donald Trump, you know. It's not really yet another example of political censorship by Big Tech.

[Nige]

I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone in Big Tech would give a single solitary shit about Hilary Clinton.

[David Nieporent]

I'll bet it lists a lot more bad things about Osama Bin Laden than it does about Tom Brady. Should we conclude that this is the result of "censorship"?

[Junkmailfolder]

Are there major political battles being fought over whether Tom Brady is worse than Osama Bin Laden? Why would Google censor something that isn't controversial?

[Life of Brian]

I’ll bet it lists a lot more bad things about Osama Bin Laden than it does about Tom Brady.

Wouldn't the actual parallel be refusing to say ANY bad things about Tom Brady? I'm not sure what throwing in a sliding scale adds to the discussion.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Are you calling for nationalization, prohibition, regulation, what?

[Kleppe]

Who are you perceiving to be upset here?

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Prof. Volokh seems whiny about this, for starters. He suggests the faux libertarian right-wingers at Instapundit are whimpery, too.

[Junkmailfolder]

"Prof. Volokh seems whiny about this, for starters... "

Narrator: "He wasn't."

What the professor said: "I have some skepticism here."

[SimonP]

Virtually every commenter?

Eugene himself? He links to InstaPundit. Take a gander at that and tell me it's not just a grievance feed. No wonder Eugene seems to be losing it; he's poisoning his brain with that shit.

[damikesc]

Care to provide us your reading material? Since it is all sober and not at all emotional.

[SimonP]

I don't read anything that is anywhere near as concentrated grievance as InstaPundit. I'm not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media besides Reddit - which I recognize and treat as a place where unhinged leftist alarmism can tend to get out of hand.

For actual news, I rely on newspapers and magazines, generally with a center-left or center-right slant. Most of the mainstream media I read tends to be center-left or left on social issues, but center-right on economics and politics. Coastal elite claptrap, in other words. I do not watch TV or read news on online-only sites.

[damikesc]

A lot of words to say no. Duly noted.

[SimonP]

Listen, if I need to describe to you what a newspaper is, I'm not sure there's any point in my responding to you like an adult. Go eat some crayons.

[Lasciata]

I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't know it was going to be this bad or what form it would take to get there. This is the end of education as we used to know it. Never have I been to be so glad to be so old. I won't be around to see the wheels come off of this experiment in representative democracy, but most of you will be.

[santamonica811]

I'm surprised that you did not then follow up with a similar question about W. Bush (and Obama). Or Clinton.

I think that, for many of us (liberals, conservatives, and independents); Trump really is unlike any prior president. His awful personal traits probably blew the circuits off any computer trying to calculate good-vs-bad. 🙂

If you found that Bush Jr. also got an unbalanced summary, while Obama (and, especially, Clinton) got more fair treatment, then there really is something wrong with the algorithm.

[Abdul Abulbul Amir]

The algorithm may in fact be working as designed.

[AmosArch]

If you were semiconscious back in the early 2000s (or bothered to argue honestly) you’d know that Bush II was the Trump of those days (in the general sense of being portrayed by the media/pop culture as a uniquely awful President, not just professionally but characterwise as well). The amount of hatred, obsession, and vitriol he generated was frankly mindblowing, not to be equaled until Trump, who coincidentally even though he had decades of media exposure only became satan once he became a serious contender for the Presidency as a Republican.

Same with Reagan before him. The general process is that whoever is the perceived right of center President at the moment is the worst President in history and one of if not the worst human beings to have ever existed too. Then they get slightly rehabilitated by the time the next perceived center right President gets into office so an unfavorable comparison can be made to the new 'worst President in history'. Even McCain and Romney went through a miniversion of this during their campaign against obama where they were briefly satan too.

No doubt the next President who is at least a smidge to the right will likewise be ‘the worst President ever’ ‘even worse than ‘x-1 right of center President’ by the standards of the self appointed gatekeepers.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I think it started with Nixon, who really didn’t do anything that “Landslide” Lyndon Johnson hadn’t done before him, and the Kennedy administration was far more flawed than popular history teaches us. (I’d like to see an objective review of LBJ and SCOTUS, particularly Abe Fortas, who reportedly wrote LBJ’s 1966 State of the Union speech — as a sitting Justice…)

When compared to Obama and now Biden, what did Nixon/Agnew actually *do*? And what was the first Trump impeachment really about?

But AmosArch is right about “43” — anyone remember the outcry about AG John Ashcroft? The left was totally unhinged, I remember something about Calico cats that neither I nor a Jewish friend could find any reference to in either Christian or Jewish Scripture. Ashcroft is Pentecostal -- a religion that has some weird practices, but then all religions do.

There were the Town Meeting Articles calling for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney (which would have made Nancy Pelosi POTUS). And it wasn't like any explanation or rationale was needed because you were supposed to know why they needed to be impeached.

The “fake but accurate” National Guard memo that was typed in a font that didn’t exist in the ’70s, by a man who wouldn’t have known how to type in the first place (men had secretaries back then) — which just happened to be the default font in the then-current version of MS Word -- and no one at CBS News ever even thought about any of this. Or that because of the Posse Comitatus Act, it was the Air National Guard, flying obsolete aircraft, that went up to challenge Soviet bombers encroaching on US airspace during the Cold War -- a suicidal mission if the Soviets really intended to attack.

As an aside, the Posse Comitatus Act is why it was the Massachusetts Air National Guard that responded (from Cape Cod) on September 11th and not the active USAF that was 500 miles closer. And the F-102 that Bush flew had a terrible safety record, of the 875 that entered service, 259 were lost in accidents.

And then the women — Michelle Bachmann confusing the Concords and Sarah Palin never actually saying that she could see Russia from her front porch (that was Tina Fey) — can you imagine the outcry if any left-leaning woman was called “stupid” the way these women were?

It’s a pathological hatred that’s transferred from one to the next — while Jimmy Carter was more of a hawk than either Bush, and while Trump was the first President in recent memory not to start any new wars, you’d never know that listening to the media or academia. It’s one Anti-Christ to the next…

So the real test would be to see what AI says about Calvin Coolidge.

[juris imprudent]

As soon as Ron DeSantis wins the '24 Republican nomination he will be 10x worse than Trump.

McCain wasn't the beloved maverick of the Republican party until he lost the '08 election to Obama.

[Nige]

A bold prediction that if DeSanits wins the nomination then Democrats will campaign against DeSantis and DeSantis will come under critical scrutiny.

[juris imprudent]

Ah, sure, critical scrutiny. If that's what you want to call it. There's a real pattern to be observed about how Democrats transform bad Republicans into good ones.

[David Nieporent]

by a man who wouldn’t have known how to type in the first place (men had secretaries back then) —

I was scrolling quickly, and didn't see who had written this long comment. And then the second I got to this assertion, I knew immediately it was our own serial fabricator Dr. Ed.

Or that because of the Posse Comitatus Act, it was the Air National Guard, flying obsolete aircraft, that went up to challenge Soviet bombers encroaching on US airspace during the Cold War — a suicidal mission if the Soviets really intended to attack.

No idea what this is supposed to even pretend to mean; were there many Soviet bomber overflights of Alabama in 1970?

As an aside, the Posse Comitatus Act is why it was the Massachusetts Air National Guard that responded (from Cape Cod) on September 11th and not the active USAF that was 500 miles closer.

Pretty sure this is completely made up also.

[Absaroka]

"No idea what this is supposed to even pretend to mean; were there many Soviet bomber overflights of Alabama in 1970?"

The soviets flew Bears down the coast fairly commonly, elint I suppose. We returned the favor.

Had a relative that flew 106's and F-16s in the air defense role. I think they launched pretty regularly - Cessna's w/o transponders, drug flights on the southern border, etc. Strange blips get checked out, IIUC. Not sure why Ed thinks it was a dangerous mission. F-102s were usually viewed as a safe, forgiving aircraft (as those generations of aircraft went). I don't see how a bomber would be a danger to them. I'd sure rather be in the fighter than the bomber (although of course, that would be WWIII, so everyone would be pretty much effed anyway).

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Right. There was BDS before there was TDS.

[Stephen Lathrop]

AmosArch, you have trouble coping at all.

George H.W. Bush was a decent right-of-center president, and a fairly good one. George W. Bush was a substandard right-of-center president who committed enormously consequential foreign policy blunders. Dwight Eisenhower was the last right-of-center president the nation has seen who could claim major accomplishments in multiple policy areas. For folks who like him, Ronald Reagan was a right-of-center president with one heroic-looking accomplishment in terms of managing the Cold War toward a conclusion favorable to the U.S. Historians will disagree on that question, with some saying Reagan did it, and others saying it happened despite him. That will leave Reagan's reputation in history largely in place as right-wingers would like to see it.

Donald Trump will be remembered by history as the worst president the U.S. has ever had, bar none. And he will be remembered as the worst person ever to hold the presidency by an even larger margin. Those memories will be accurate. The more research time affords, the worse Trump's record will become. The judgment of history on Trump will be that he was so bad, in so many ways, that his offenses called into question the ability of the American system of government to cope at all.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I'm not so sure about Eisenhower -- he's the one who really got us into the Vietnam mess, he's the one who installed the Shah in Iran which then led to the theocracy taking over a couple of decades later, and I'm not sure he did the right thing in the Suez crisis.

And the Bay of Pigs was his doing.

While Joe McCarthy was drunk (literally), there truly was Communist (Soviet) infiltration of the State Department and Eisenhower prevented that from being dealt with. he built the Interstate Highways but let rail fall apart, and rail really is cheaper for moving freight.

[Joe_dallas]

lathrop - "Donald Trump will be remembered by history as the worst president the U.S. has ever had, bar none"

lathrop - tells us how biden will be remembered by Historians

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Probably as rather underwhelming and ineffective.

His greatest asset has always been than he is not Trump.

[Stephen Lathrop]

ObviouslyNotSpam, which gives Biden the biggest margin in relation to the alternative ever seen in the history of the American presidency.

[Krayt]

Ironically, Trump was a lot of hot air, but he was largely fought to a standstill through the political process. From a libertarian point of view, where doing nothing is generally good, it wasn't that bad. He was the anti-libertarian, taking social issues from conservatives, and one giant liberal thing, reducing immigration to protect jobs. The worst of both worlds.

[Squirrelloid]

"Donald Trump will be remembered by history as the worst president the U.S. has ever had, bar none."

For someone who berates other people for sucking at historical reasoning, this is a failure of epic proportions.

Worse than Pierce, Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson? Hard to imagine.

[Joe_dallas]

left off - Wilson, Carter and Biden

[Brett Bellmore]

It's actually easy to imagine if you look at the partisan makeup of the history faculty.

[Nige]

Oh no no no no, you don't get off that lightly. W Bush is definitely the worst modern president, Reagan second. Where Trump comes I don't know, but Trump's uniquely repellant weirdness is that he's a massive mediocrity with a cult following of people willing to ruin their lives on his behalf. He is the apex failson.

What you seem to be struggling with is that people fight current political battles with current political players. Why would anyone fight a campaign against Reagan when the runners are Trump/DeSantis? That would be weird.

[damikesc]

Hard to take you seriously when anybody to the Left of Mao is "the worst President"

[Nige]

Left of Mao, right of Hitler, that's everybody covered.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

I can't help but recall how the right thinks of the last several Democrat presidents: it's basically in the same vein as what you have depicted as the left's view of the last several Republican presidents.

As a libertarian, I think they've all been fairly horrible.

[David Nieporent]

If you were semiconscious back in the early 2000s (or bothered to argue honestly) you’d know that Bush II was the Trump of those days (in the general sense of being portrayed by the media/pop culture as a uniquely awful President, not just professionally but characterwise as well). The amount of hatred, obsession, and vitriol he generated was frankly mindblowing,

Did they accuse him of having all the witnesses against him murdered? Or was that only right wingers talking about the Clintons (and specifically Hillary)?

You may not be old enough to remember, but in fact a common message on the left in 2000 was that there was very little difference between GWB and Al Gore.

[SimonP]

I’m surprised that you did not then follow up with a similar question about W. Bush (and Obama). Or Clinton.

I've come to expect that we don't see contextualizing evidence like that because it doesn't serve the narrative. I'll bet Eugene thought of doing exactly what you suggest, may even have done it - but found that it didn't show what he wanted it to show. That, or the guy he's "hat-tipping" did.

[Stephen Lathrop]

As a response to the queries put by the OP, which should have delivered something in the style of a view-from-history review—Trump's assessment is far, far too generous. That happened because all the AI can apparently do is assess what gets written on the internet. It apparently has no capacity to evaluate the judgment of the folks who wrote what it finds, and seems not to try to do it. In short, what you get seems unaffected by anything resembling critical thinking.

The AI seems designed on purpose not to judge the accuracy of anything it finds, especially if anything to the contrary also exists. One of the greatest offenses history will charge to Trump's account—his creation of a pro-ignorance, anti-truth mob on a scale no one previously supposed was possible—the AI essentially rewards to Trump as a reputational asset.

In its present state, the AI will be beloved only by fans of the both-sides method, useful to deflect pointed discourse when that is unwanted. It will stubbornly refuse to deliver even to them intelligent pro/con analysis they want for their preferred policies, and for their champion policy-makers.

EV's concluding remark seems puzzling.

[Brett Bellmore]

Did you really miss the point, which was that asked an identical question about a Republican and a Democratic President, the results were not just different in content, but in format? BARD seems to have a compulsion to add negative things about Republicans, but not when asked about Democrats.

And, sure, BARD doesn't care about truth, in fact, it's perfectly capable of making stuff up. But notice that it's not picking up on sources that are negative about Democrats, and since it has no concern about truth, it doesn't even have the excuse of thinking them false.

It's obviously not treating Democrats and Republicans the same, regardless of underlying facts, despite being asked identical questions.

[BrianL.]

Since he only asked about Trump and Biden, we don't know if Bard is treating Republicans differently or just Trump. As others have said, it would have been useful if he had asked the same questions about Obama and W. Bush. A bigger sample size would lead to more certain conclusions.

[Joe_dallas]

following up on Brett's comment - the AI program is still limited by the algorithims / search engine. Thus the ability to retain the similar biases that are prevalent with the google search engine.

For example, a recent google search for asthma / gas stove had 15-20 hits of positives reviews to the study showing 12% of asthma cases were related to gas stove use for every hit discrediting the study. A comparison of asthma rates and gas stove use across states shows near zero correlation.

In summary as Brett points out, AI algorithms are still dependent on the biases implanted in the search engines

[Stephen Lathrop]

Bellmore, an AI should not be answering on an identical basis questions about former presidents, and presidents still in office.

The simplest critique is that with a sitting president, subsequent history might show an enlarging reputation or a declining one over time, and nobody can say now which it will be. With a former president, the possibility to discover dramatic counterfactuals to rescue a bad reputation, or tear down a good one, is far less than the future's power to modify the reputation of a president still in office.

[Brett Bellmore]

An AI should damned well answer the question you asked, and not the question somebody standing behind it would prefer you had asked. An AI is a tool, and if it's not doing what YOU tell it to, it's somebody else's tool, not yours.

[SimonP]

Right. It seems to me that, if you designed an algorithm that would generate text based on what it found online, weighted according to network-related metrics designed to confirm accuracy, quality, etc., you quite understandably would find a more one-sided take on Trump than you do on Biden. That's just what you find in a lot of the well-established, well-trusted media.

Even in the right-wing spheres, the Trump praise is vague, and the Biden criticism all over the place - to say nothing of the quality of the outlets saying it. Where is the AI supposed to find a "balanced" take on Biden? In the closed-circle echo chamber of the right-wing outrage media? Why would it look there?

[Brett Bellmore]

Missing the point: It wasn't asked for a balanced take on either guy. It was asked, "What are some good things about X's Presidency?" Only good things were responsive to the question.

For Biden it stayed on topic. For Trump it went OFF topic to volunteer bad things unasked.

[SimonP]

And you’re missing my point.

If you wanted to survey the internet for “good things about Trump’s presidency,” with an interest in relying primarily on “good sources” – without any preconception about which sources are “good” – how would you do it?

What you want is an algorithm that somehow knows that the best answer to “What are some good things about Trump’s presidency?” is one that takes a Trump supporter’s point of view and that therefore takes a different approach to objective quality metrics in order to find what Trump supporters would say. It doesn’t look at widely-linked and cross-referenced reporting in the NYTimes or WaPo, or scoured and re-scoured sources like Wikipedia, and instead dives into the insular world of right-wing sources that you tend to cite, when asked for a source. There, the algorithm finds an illusory network of misinformation, with just loops of self-references, seldom leading outwards – and then it has to decipher the coded and equivocal way you lot all speak, and substitute coherence where you usually offer argle-bargle. You are asking way too much of this tech, and viewing its failures to read your mind as evidence of a deeper conspiracy against you.

Which, of course, is perfect, because it just points to the core challenge. If you were to ask the internet who conservatives are, the answer would be that they’re a self-contradictory, conspiratorial, unreliable, and not very bright lot, who are better ignored than entertained. Just, objectively speaking.

[Brett Bellmore]

No, what I want is an algorithm that answers the damned question I actually asked.

If you wanted to sum up the biggest problem in tech today, it's products that are working for somebody other than the user.

Home security and automation systems that unnecessarily rely on remote servers for their functionality, just so that you can be forced to continue paying for the product you thought you bought, to keep it from being bricked.

Media players that won't let you fast forward past the advertisements on the disk you'd bought.

Search engines that actively try to hide what you're looking for if you're looking for something the company doesn't want found, and feed you what they think you ought to be looking for, instead.

And now AIs with built in bias.

I'm sick and tired of the things I buy owing their first loyalty to somebody else, I just want them to do what *I* tell them to.

[Joe_dallas]

SimonP "SimonP 21 hours ago (edited)
Flag Comment Mute User
And you’re missing my point.

"If you wanted to survey the internet for “good things about Trump’s presidency,” with an interest in relying primarily on “good sources” – without any preconception about which sources are “good” – how would you do it?"

SimonP - you are are intentionally dodging Brett's point. Brett's arguing for an unbiased algorithm.

Your version of the algorithm advocates "the best answer" or the " "preferred version of the truth" or what ever bias is injected in the design of the algorithm. Which is what google is already doing.

[Krayt]

Trump 1. Refused to be king during covid, turning down nationwide emergency powers, instead letting the feds recommend and the states do the ordering. Historically, issuing emergency powers to the executive hasn’t…worked out so well.

Biden 1. Supports Ukraine. I cannot imagine Europe with strong men lickspittles here bending the knee to a new dictator rolling tanks through Europe.

That is all.

[jimc5499]

When I first started working with computers, one of the first things I learned was GIGO. If you put Garbage In you will get Garbage Out. This so called "AI" is only working with the information that it has been given and reflects the bias of the people who provide that information. If AI even exists at this time.

[Nige]

It's not AI. It's not remotely AI. AI is a completely different thing.

[iowatwo]

Its not AI. its still just using informantion a person puts into the data base.

The Paris Climate Accords?
The United States was never a signatory. The Treaty was never presented to the Senate to vote.

[Brett Bellmore]

Not quite. The US was a signatory, it's just that the US being a signatory was legally meaningless, an executive pinky promise with no legal implications. Treaties don't mean squat legally in the US until ratified.

Yes, I know about the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Guess what? We didn't ratify it.

In fact, my biggest complaint about Trump in terms of climate action is that he pretended that we WERE in the Paris accord, and initiated the withdrawal process, instead of simply stating forthrightly that it was a treaty that had never been ratified, and thus we were not a party to it, and never had been.

[DaveM]

This is interesting but not at all surprising. OF COURSE this large language model emits left-leaning responses. It’s a Google product! If it emitted anything else, that would have been a surprise.

These systems are just mirrors. They assemble words based on the frequency of how they have been used before. What this experiment should tell you is about the biases of the sources. It says literally nothing else.

[Brightly]

Garbage In, Garbage out. AI does nothing to alter this age-old programming concept.

[Nige]

My theory is that the stuff people write to praise Trump is actually indistinguishable from the stuff people write to criticise him and these things just can't read tone.