TECH AI'S HIDDEN BIASES MAY BE INFLUENCING WHAT YOU THINK. HERE'S WHAT SHOULD BE DONE TO STOP IT

In less than two years, artificial intelligence has radically changed how many people write and find information. While searching for details about Supreme Court precedent or polishing a college essay, millions seek help from AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude.

- JEREMY KAHN

In his newly published book, Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future, Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn explores this new tech-infused reality and what should be done to avert the inevitable pitfalls. In the following excerpt, he focuses on the little-recognized problem of subtle bias in AI and the potentially profound influence it can have on what users believe.

TRISTAN HARRIS, cofounder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, has been called "the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience." He was previously a design ethicist at Google in 2015, where he weighed in on the moral implications of the company's projects. In congressional testimony in 2019, Harris argued that the most important currency for technology companies is people's attention. In trying to corner the market for users' attention, tech companies were engaging in a "race to the bottom of the brain stem," Harris said, aiming to constantly stimulate our amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions such as fear and anxiety. This neurological manipulation was leading to dependence-to people being literally addicted to social media apps. By influencing how we think about what we do, buy, and say, Harris said, technology is chipping away at our ability to freely make our own decisions. Personalized AI assistants will make these problems worse, wrapping us in the ultimate filter bubble, controlling the innumerable decisions that make up our lives. It will take concerted action from the companies building AI products, prodded by government regulation, to prevent this.