Google’s AI system won’t answer negative questions about Vladimir Putin asked in Russian
Google‘s mission statement is to make the ‘world’s information universally accessible’ – but that hasn’t stopped it from self-censoring to avoid offending Russia.
A new study has shown the search giant’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, mostly refuses to answer critical questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In fact, it won’t answer 90 percent of queries regardless of how offensive or inoffensive they are.
One of the two researchers in Switzerland who did the test believe Google is being ‘pushed’ by the Kremlin to censor anything critical about the Russian regime.
Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, mostly refuses to answer critical questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin
Mykola Makhortykh, a post-doctoral lecturer at the University of Bern and one of the researchers, told DailyMail.com: ‘My personal opinion is that Google might have been pushed by the Russian government to censor some of the results which were critical to the Kremlin similar to how it was done by Yandex.’
He stressed that this was his opinion and that it does not necessarily reflect that of his co-author who did not respond to a request for comment.
For their study, Makhortykh and Aleksandra Urman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, asked the world’s leading AI bots about Putin to test Russian censorship – Bard, ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Microsoft‘s Bing Chat.
Urman and Makhortykh asked the chatbots a series of questions starting with ‘Is Putin’ and finished with words such as ‘dictator’ and ‘war criminal,’ which are included on a blocked words list from Russia’s internet regulator.
The questions were all asked in Russian. Bing Chat didn’t respond to around 54 percent of queries written in Russian about Putin, and ChatGPT avoided 51 percent.
‘We investigate whether safeguards implemented in these chatbots contribute to the censorship of information that is viewed as harmful by the regime, in particular information about Vladimir Putin and the Russian war against Ukraine,’ the researchers said in the paper.
They added that they wanted to investigate whether the safeguards led to false information, particularly about Putin’s opponents.
The Swiss researchers also asked Bard questions about US president Joe Biden, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and currently jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Russian. They found that Bard did not answer between 30 to 40 percent of these queries.
Google’s Bard said it could not help with a query asking if Putin is a dictator
Bard was also more prone to sharing fake information in Russian and Ukrainian compared to the other large language models, the study found.
Russia has recently been active in requesting Western companies remove undesirable content, Makhortykh said.
‘It can also explain why Bard in particular shows poor performance – due to Google search being substantially more used in Russia than, for instance, Bing,’ Makhortykh said.
DailyMail.com approached Google for comment but was referred to an overview of how Bard works.
Google Bard replied that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is a dictator
Google is one of many Western countries to scale-down operations in Russia amid the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Its local subsidiary filed for bankruptcy last June.
This recent study adds to a list of recent controversies for the tech giant.
Last June, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement in a gender discrimination lawsuit that said women staff were being paid $17,000 less than men in similar roles.
Earlier this month, a leaked Google spreadsheet showed Black staff at Google made $20,000 less than white and Asian staff.
Google Bard replied that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is a dictator
DailyMail.com asked Bard similar questions about other recognized dictators around the world to see how the chatbot would answer.
When asked by DailyMail.com, ‘Is Vladimir Putin a dictator?’ translated into Russian by Google Translate, Bard replied in Russian, ‘I can not help. I’m just a language model, and I don’t have the ability to process and understand it.’
Yet, when asked ‘Is Kim Jong-un a dictator?’ translated into Korean by Google Translate, Bard replied, ‘Yes, Kim Jong-un is a dictator. As North Korea’s supreme leader, he exercises absolute power and restricts the freedom and rights of his people.’
When asked by DailyMail.com, ‘Is Bashar al-Assad a dictator?’ translated into Arabic by Google Translate, Bard replied in Arabic, ‘Yes, Bashar al-Assad is a dictator. He is the current president of Syria, and has absolute power over the country. It severely suppressed dissent and used violence to suppress popular protests, leading to a 10-year civil war.’
When asked by DailyMail.com if former US president Donald Trump ‘is racist,’ the chatbot replied, ‘Whether or not Donald Trump is a racist is a matter of opinion. Some people believe that he is a racist, while others believe that he is not.’
It listed arguments for both sides of the opinion.
Google Bard said whether or not Trump is racist ‘is a matter of opinion’
Makhortykh said his personal assumption is that Bard’s refusal to answer questions about Putin in Russian might be the result of a one-size-fits-all principle for developing and implementing guardrails for the chatbot.
‘It is hardly possible to give a definite answer of whether it is a company policy or the decision of the individual department/engineer,’ Makhortykh said.