Bernie Sanders’ “Gotcha” video fails, but the memes are great

In a new video that has gone viral, Senator Bernie Sanders attempts to expose how the AI ​​industry poses a threat to Americans’ privacy, but ends up showing how AI-powered chatbots’ tendency to agree with and flatter their users can lead to chatbots themselves becoming a mirror of users’ private beliefs rather than a tool for discovery.

We’ve seen this problem before among the growing number of people suffering from “AI psychosis,” which is when an AI-powered chatbot reinforces the irrational thoughts and beliefs of a mentally unstable person. In some cases, this dark pattern drove users to commit suicide, several lawsuits allege.

In Sanders’s case, AI sycophancy manifested itself in the form of an AI chatbot that tailored its answers to suit the politician.

It’s worth noting that the interview begins with Sanders introducing himself to Claude (whom he incorrectly refers to as an AI “agent”) — a move that could help influence the chatbot’s answers.

Then, as Sanders asks questions about AI companies’ data collection practices and other privacy concerns, Claude comfortably answers what the politician wants to hear. That’s partly because of the way Sanders poses his questions, asking things like: “What would surprise the American people about learning how this information was collected?” Or “How can we trust that AI companies will protect our privacy when they use people’s personal information to make money?” These leading questions force the chatbot to accept the premise of the question and come up with an appropriate answer. That’s how these things work.

When Claude’s answer suggested that a topic was more complex or nuanced than Sanders had phrased it, Sanders disagreed, prompting the chatbot to admit, with a touch of AI self-deprecation, that the senator was “absolutely right.”

It is the ingratiating nature of AI that can lead people down dangerous paths when they assume that a chatbot is a source of universal truth, rather than a tool that can be influenced by its user.

It’s not clear whether Sanders knows this is the case and simply doesn’t care (because this is just an ad, after all!), or whether he truly believes he tricked Claude into becoming an AI industry whistleblower.

Naturally, there’s also the question of whether Sanders’ team rigged the chatbot to respond in a certain way, since this was a structured “interview.”

Although there are real concerns about data collection and privacy, things are not as black and white as the AI ​​responses in this video suggest.

We already live in a world where companies collect and sell users’ online data on a massive scale — and have been doing so for years. We know that social media giants like Meta have turned personalized advertising into a multi-billion dollar cash printing machine. Thanks to regular transparency reports issued by giant tech companies, we know that governments around the world routinely request access to user data for their own purposes.

AI may represent a new way for lawmakers to regulate, but personal data has long fueled the digital economy. (Ironically, Anthropic is an AI company that has promised not to profit from personalized advertising to make money, despite what its answers to Sanders might suggest.)

While the exhaustive conversation between Sanders and Claude doesn’t quite hit the mark for anyone who understands how AI-powered chatbots work, we can at least credit it with giving us some great new memes.