Once You See the Big Tech Bias
You Can't Unsee It
This is why The Technoskeptic Magazine exists.
Our magazine’s founder, Mo Lotman, wrote several years ago (full text on our “About” page), “At The Technoskeptic, we don’t hate technology. If that were true, we’d be walking to your house barefoot to deliver this magazine as an epic poem. But we approach it with caution. We may not individually agree on which technologies are and aren’t worthwhile. But we do agree that this sense of inevitability, this sense of serial acquiescence to what technologists insist is progress, needs to be halted. We encourage you to join us. Think before you adopt. Make informed choices. Understand history. Broaden your scope of perception. People may consider us naysayers or Luddites, and that’s fine. We are not trying to be balanced because the scale is already 1000-1 tilted in favor of new technology.”
Does that sound like hyperbole, to claim that voices in favor of tech outnumber those asking questions 1,000 to one?
In a recent exchange about AI with Birgitte Rasine, a Silicon Valley Valley veteran of 15 years who now publishes the most excellent Substack The Muse, she noted to me that a lot of tech reporting these days amounts to “publishing Silicon Valley press releases.” And she’s in a position to know.
How about Rasine? Does her claim sound hyperbolic?
Let’s present “Exhibit A,” Politico’s recent article about a few wealthy individuals spending money lobbying in Washington D.C. for AI safety and AI regulation. They are labeled “AI doomsayers,” not AI safety advocates. These two “doomsayer” organizations are throwing around *troubling* amounts of money like “…$100,000 lobbying each in the last three months of the year.” A different organization, the Future of Life Institute, also spent $500,000 since 2020 fighting for AI safety.
Seemingly too busy uncovering the dangers of Effective Altruists pouring *huge* sums into lobbying in Washington D.C., the Politico reporter-and his editor(s), which is doubly damning if you understand newsrooms-couldn’t be bothered to spend the literally 30 seconds it would have taken to find out what the other side of this issue spends on their lobbying in Washington D.C. This is money spent to make sure AI stays virtually unregulated and incurs zero legal liability, no matter what damage AI may inflict.
Or, even worse, Brendan Bordelon and his editors at Politico did the due diligence, and opted not to include it, because the comparison it exposed would have made the premise of their article evaporate like morning dew in an Arizona summer. If the latter is the case, that moves it from merely lazy and incompetently credulous reporting to deliberately trying to hide the truth from readers, the original sin in journalism.
Here’s Exhibit B, an article by CNBC (based on work by the nonprofit, OpenSecrets) tallying up the money AI cheerleaders spent lobbying in 2023 alone on AI and other issues: $957,000,000.
A little basic math says two AI safety organizations, each spending $100,000 lobbying in three months, would spend about $800,000 in a year. Add to that the ~$150,000 spent by the Future of Life Institute for 2023. Not quite a million dollars, total. So, these “doomer” AI safety lobbyists worried about the potentially lethal impact of unregulated AI are spending less than 10 dollars for every 10,000 dollars spent by the “no AI regulation” crowd. Scary!
“But wait,” you say. “To be fair, not all the money these massive tech companies spent lobbying DC was spent directly on AI issues.” Fine. To be bend-over-backward fair, assume only 1/5th of the money the massive tech companies TikTok, Tesla, Spotify, Shopify, Samsung, Palantir, Nvidia, Dropbox, Anthropic, OpenAI, AMD, TSMC, and VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz spent lobbying was spent specifically on AI issues-even though they have eye-watering sums invested in unregulated AI.
That would mean for every $9.50 spent by AI safety advocates, $2,000 is spent by the “AI-without-regulation-or-liability” crowd. Seems fair, right? High-quality journalism? To focus on the $9.50 side, and ignore the $2,000 side?
Groups skeptical of the reckless rush to Artificial General Intelligence are being outspent by at least 200-to-one by those who want it developed as quickly as possible, and with as few constraints as possible (or legal requirements to pay for the training data they stole). The reporters covering BigTech in the new world order of “access journalism” understand which side of the battle has bows and arrows, and which has F-35s and smart bombs. The imperative of outlet survival pushes reporters and editors toward picking the side best positioned to bestow the scraps that will let your outlet stay open for another month.
Thus, Politico’s article that a cabal of “doomsayers” are secretly in the pocket of BigAI, and their push for AI regulation is “… a well-funded smokescreen to head off regulation and competition.”
Understand the convoluted logic being peddled there?
A few rich tech people are spending money to lobby for AI regulation because they secretly DON’T WANT AI regulation but also they DO WANT AI regulation, but just the kind that will hurt new AI startups. “Weaponized regulatory capture,” oh my!
Not that any evidence of regulatory capture is provided. When pressed, even AI companies will admit the Biden Administration’s AI executive order -repealable at a stroke of the pen by the next president-has zero impact on current AI models. The minimal constraints the executive order suggests won’t even kick in until AI models are five times larger than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.
Politico’s readers are being urged to fret about a theory so Byzantine even residents of Constantinople wouldn’t credit it-but NOT about the nearly billion dollars Big Tech spent lobbying in 2023 to shut down any discussion of real AI regulation. Heaven forfend that bit of math gets injected into the coverage.
Framing any regulation of tech as dystopian anti-capitalism is not a new ploy, by the way. The perpetual firehose of lobbying money from Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc is the reason we don’t have federal privacy legislation with real teeth limiting the information Big Tech collects and monetizes. It is money well spent, as it has ensured that with a few exceptions, serious state and federal privacy legislation always goes down in flames.
The Politico piece couldn’t have been a bigger pile of steaming…propaganda if it were personally written by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen-both of whom stand to gain tremendously if AI can be built with no regulation.
Publicly calling out cringeworthy tech-lapdog coverage is why The Technoskeptic Magazine exists. Perhaps our message will be overwhelmed by the money and power brought to bear by Big Tech’s cult of AI, which relentlessly frames anybody who cares about AI safety or the legion of other problems AI may inflict as “AI doomers.”
So be it. Regardless of how much Big Tech “games” the press coverage of AI, we’ll be fighting to get our message out, and we’re not alone. BigTech had the money, but we have the numbers: 82% of Americans don’t trust AI companies to self-regulate, and 83% believe AI could lead to a catastrophic accident.
Even in a fraying democracy, numbers still count for something.