Large Language Models such as ChatGPT definitely have their uses, but embedded in those large language models are some large language biases, as Bill is about to show despite the danger to himself.
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Drones Take Down PUBLIC ENEMY #1
July 25, 2026
7 Comments
Love this episode. Thanks for it. Hope you can explore other biases as well.
When using an A.I., don’t forget Bender…
“Kill all humans..(snore), Kill all humans..(snore), (awakens) Oh, I was having the best dream. I think you were in it.”. Bender to Fry, Futurama
I’m sorry Scott, we’re not going to agree on this but you are akimbo on the “speak the truth in love” thing. The way you’re going about it is the same way political correctness came to be and it’s the same mechanism. Which is akin to trying to pick up a turd from the clean end. IF you speak the truth, THEN that is a thing done in love. You don’t need to soft-peddle the truth. If someone is offended or hurt or in any way discomfited by the truth then that is their problem not yours (or mine etc.).… Read more »
Enjoyed your view. One that I share, at the expense of friendships with men a few times in my life. (“If you think Kavanaugh raped this woman,” I said to a lifelong friend who became a lawyer, “I have to question your intelligence and, if not that, your motivations. ‘Cause that’s just dumb” He got up from our monthly breakfast get-together and left me with the bill and a couple years of no calls.) I think Scott suffers from being genuinely nice and would rather get along than go hard on the facts. He also plays a role here on… Read more »
To be fair, Bill, the Scarlett Johansson character, Black Widow, is a comic book fiction. There is nothing realistic to be gleaned from that, and any contrary expectation is absurd. In fact, there is too much angst about these fictitious, female characters in movies and video games. For the past few years I’ve played a video game called destiny 2, and many players use the female avatars because of the smaller target cross section in that first-person shooter game. A smaller target is harder to kill in a multiplayer game like that, and it declares nothing about females being better… Read more »
Speaking truth, as Scott describes, does not require respect as is misunderstood by many people. Respect is too often defined to require someone to give praise and/or affirmation to someone else — regardless of accomplishment or worth. Expectations for such accolades negatively color the intended truth that must be spoken. Facts reveal truth, whereas, agendas subvert it.
I would say showing somebody respect is giving them the unvarnished truth. Trying to soften or hide or disguise the truth to slip it in under their radar is not respecting them.
Here’s a use of LLMs that may cause one to really question the information that they generate. Meaningful text can be hidden in text that is reversibly-transformable into other meaningful text. The concept is named steganography, and a method is described in this technical paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075). In it the authors present their recent implementation of the methods using LLMs to produce meaningful text from other meaningful text using arbitrary keys, which may be used to steer the encoded results. The encoded text can then be decoded to reproduce the original text or re-encoded into something else. This reveals the arbitrariness… Read more »
What flabbergasts me is the expectation of human beings, including Bill, that these digital puppets are anything more than the sum of their programmed, biased information. The symptom that Bill is describing is a human trait that tends to obfuscate information in order to gain some agenda-based benefit. A lie of omission is nothing more than a deceit softened by descriptors like “white,” but they are still lies. All of these LLMs are trained (i.e., programmed) with fundamentally biased data, and I’ve determined that they are only reliable in STEM activities (not STEAM) like computer programming, physics and other basic… Read more »
Not only did Ripley go when men didn’t, she didn’t go true hand to hand. She used guns. And in my favorite scene when she said “Get away from her, you b*tch!” , she was using a machine she was trained in to go toe to toe with the Alien. Still bad*ss, though.
Just like women in combat. Especially combat pilots. If you can stand the G forces, the rest is mainly skill.
Steve, you are SPOT ON when you speak of the software being the issue. I foresaw that coming years ago. I spoke with others explaining that AI can only be as good as the software that is running it. So some left wing programmers get hold if AI software, and the whole world tilts left.
Great show guys, but the sound timing is just a bit off… ugh, sorry to point that out.
Bill, I typed both your boys vs FloJo and the Nobel questions as you stated them into Grok and got absolutely objective answers. No pandering whatsoever. Surely you have read some of the wildly absurd answers that both Gemini and Chat produced that Elon has revealed on X, even fairly recently. I know you probably know that Grok is much better in this bias subject but I would have liked to have seen one or all of you make a case for Grok as at least making an effort to produce the truth that so many other AIs have not.… Read more »