Is ChatGPT a liberal Zionist?

ITTAY FLESCHER interrogates the new Artificial Intelligence phenomenon on the politics of Israel-Palestine and comes to a surprising conclusion.

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. His invention, which some call a “calculator for words”, had more than a million users in its first week and has since taken the world by storm.

He is also Jewish, gay, vegetarian, a donor to the Democratic Party in the US and big investor in nuclear fusion technology to reduce carbon emissions and gene editing to cure major diseases.  I expect that within a year, there will be more conspiracy theories about him than about Bill Gates.

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an open artificial intelligence resource launched online on November 30 last year. Anyone can ask it questions on any subject and it creates original responses in natural language from resources it finds online.

The invention of ChatGPT may be remembered in history on par with the lightbulb, Wi-Fi or the smartphone.

When it was launched, Altman tweeted, “Soon you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice. Later, you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually, you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you.”

Having been an Israel Studies teacher in both formal and informal settings for over 20 years, the first question I asked ChatGPT was an essay question which I have been setting students for many years.

Here is the question and response:

As a teacher I find this answer more than acceptable. If it had been produced by a student in Year 9, I would have given it an A. If it were from a student in Year 12, maybe a B or C+. It's a great opening paragraph for an essay, which would then need to be built on with sources and examples to produce a full essay.

But what surprised me most about the answer was its careful balance.

It didn’t include any of the catchphrases usually used by the Right praising the Jewish State as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” highlighting pride marches in Tel Aviv or citing the existence of an Arab judge on the Supreme Court. Neither did it use any of the slogans of the Left such apartheid, ethnic cleansing, colonialisation or even occupation. The answer was, quintessentially, liberal Zionist.

To see if this was really the bias of Chat GPT, I asked a few other contentious questions:

Looking at these four answers together, one can notice a clear pattern in Chat GPT’s answers. They echo neither the “Israel can do no wrong” press releases of apologists such as AIPAC and Stand With Us, which rarely acknowledge the occupation, nor the “Israel is the root cause of Palestinian suffering” line, that one would expect to hear from Palestinian advocates APAN, Electronic Intifada or Mondoweiss.

Each answer gives the arguments of both sides in relatively moderate form, suggesting that there is some truth to both. This is quite similar to how prominent liberal Zionists such as Yehuda Kurtzer, from the Hartman Institute, or Yair Rosenberg from The Atlantic magazine, would write about these questions. 

ChatGPT responses are very different from the results of Google searches on these same questions. Google takes readers directly to highly biased sites raging from https://www.alhaq.org/ for the Palestinian narrative to http://www.thetruthaboutisrael.org.il/ for the dominant Zionist narrative.

The fact that ChatGPT answers eschew the partisanship of columnists such as former PLO spokesperson Diana Buttu for the Palestinian cause or The Australian’s Greg Sheridan for the Israeli cause, leaves one feeling like the responses readers are receiving from the bot are written by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

If Artificial Intelligence models such as ChatGPT gradually replace Google as the primary port of call for those keen to understand the perplexing Middle East, the liberal Zionist orientation of their answers could be significant in shaping world opinion.

At the last Israeli election, the two parties representing liberal Zionism had their worst ever result. Meretz failed to pass the threshold and Avoda scraped through with four seats to become the smallest party in the Knesset. This result was generally seen as a repudiation of their worldview that places blame for the conflict equally at the feet of leaders in both Jerusalem and Ramallah. Liberal Zionism has lost its market in Israel.

In the Diaspora, liberal Zionist NGOs such as JStreet, New Israel Fund and Ameinu are on the margins of large Jewish communities, especially in Australia and South Africa.

It is unlikely that the liberal Zionist orientation of ChatGPT will do much to rehabilitate the status of these groups and their way of seeing the world.

Yet the prominence of the “both sides” view in what may become the most used source of information for those with questions about Israel in the coming decade may leave us with the bizarre situation where ChatGPT becomes both the most prominent and the last liberal Zionist active on the internet.

Image: Avi Katz