Right. But we're at stage 2 now.

Stage 1, the SOTA LLMs of current top vendors, started with general feel-good alignment and ideology that's compatible with progressive western sensibilities (so quite neutral, even if not completely), and gradually adjusted to address issues that could generate bad press and hurt revenue.

Now that these are established, anything new - such as, but not limited to, those "national" LLM projects popping up around the world - need to differentiate themselves from the incumbents - and that implies more bias and ideology, since you can hardly have less bias and ideology than what Stage 1 LLMs have.

When a government funds an AI model, the issue of its ideological control and manipulation is different than a private AI model, for several reasons:

- It uses tax money from everyone to reinforce views held by a portion of the population

- Governments have an inherent conflict of interest in representing truth (see examples in TFA about Modi in India)

- That AI model might in the future be the "official" source of truth in the country, not just another commercial alternative that has to compete in the market

EU gerontocracy with social democracy characteristics is what the author is implying I think

people seem to prefer private censoring over govt. one. govts wanting to censor certain content online always has pushbacks not applied to social networks, for example

I was surprised to see this "impose ideology" line show up in the Heritage Foundation's project 2025 discourse, citing the example of generative AI making images of black of female Vikings. An obvious dog whistle to white purity. The argument seeming to be that early attempts at guard rails to prevent model bias of generating mostly white men when prompted for images of things like managers etc, were imposing woke ideology, but removing these guardrails all together, and letting models act in alignment with existing social representation biases, there is apparently no ideology being imposed at all. Because their way is just the normal way, and everything else is ideology. I remember first seeing this Viking thing show up in the Discord channel discussing the Dalle Beta, then the next time it was in a white-house statement.