There’s been a lot of low-level anxiety about the dangers of artificial intelligence recently, particularly as A.I. becomes more and more accessible to the average internet user, and thus, more and more a part of our daily lives.


Much has been made of how A.I. is trained, and whether it’s trained in a way that means A.I. simply replicates the existing biases and bigotries of the humans who’ve programmed it. With that in mind, it looks like someone or something at Microsoft trained Bing’s A.I. image generator on some questionable material, because research analyst and lecturer Julian Waller got some interesting results recently when he asked the generator to make an image depicting “democracy vs authoritarianism.”



In the image, authoritarianism (or “auΠhorisism” as it says on the banner in the image) is a bright and colorful cityscape with a large park and families happily walking toward the city. The only odd aspects of the image, besides the banner, are a flag with what looks like an eye peering out over the city and a bunch of unidentifiable flying green creatures in the sky. Should we take this to mean that under authoritarianism, UFOs will no longer be kept secret by the government?


Meanwhile, the image generated for democracy is much darker. A red image depicting dark clouds rolling over the city and mass amounts of soldiers in formation, with one colorful Jenga-looking building and a yellow “democracy banner,” it looks like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, a book which was not, from memory, about the pitfalls of democracy.


One person replied, “When the training data is just Weimar Germany and Singapore.” Meanwhile, many others joked that Bing must prefer “authorisism.” I guess A.I. is allowed to have its preferences, as long as it doesn’t gain sentience and join forces with authoritarian despots to overthrow democratically-elected governments.


I guess the only silver lining is that we now know what that looks like.