DOGE Bro's Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?'
techdirt.com55 points by hn_acker 2 hours ago
55 points by hn_acker 2 hours ago
My guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
I wonder what the economic cost of DOGE basing policy entirely on whether something is DEI or not. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
def accept_grant(application):
return random.choice([True, False])Is this the classic model?
No, that accepts far too many grants. You'd need to add weights=[1, 100] to it.
It sounds like they stupidly did exactly what was stupidly expected.
> We’ve mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy’s family.
Sorry for the OT, but... what on earth?
Simple, cheap and fast
"Simple, cheap, fast," and somewhere between inaccurate and wrong. From the article:
> To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.
The culture warrior understanding of the term "DEI" does not reflect reality. The prompt is trash. Garbage in, garbage out.
This is somehow even stupider than similar reports of grants being canceled simply for containing specific keywords commonly used in scientific research but also on the culture warrior no-no list.
In what way does ChatGPT’s understanding of the term DEI not reflect reality?
The pejorative sense of DEI has probably poisoned the training data. You might be able to prompt around it, but the existing prompt is pretty lazy.
From the article:
> For example, the AI searches [purportedly related to DEI] flagged .... a film examining how the game of baseball was “instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan,”
How at all is that DEI? (Surely that should be WWII, yes? The complaint also says "I".)
And, is this also DEI?
> another charting “the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934,”
American football would be impoverished without the contributions of Native Americans from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experimental Native American boarding school.
Pratt, who founded the school, wrote "If all men are created equal, then why were blacks segregated in separate regiments and Indians segregated on separate tribal reservations? Why weren't all men given equal opportunities and allowed to assume their rightful place in society? Race became a meaningless abstraction in his mind." Is that also DEI?
Would you care to summarize what DEI means in reality?
In the sense that viewpoints of people that use the term DEI do not appear to reflect reality?
What kind of sentiment do you think you would find in the training material regarding the term DEI?
We're going to look back at the second Grump admin as what happens when society enthusiastically embraces ego-stroking hallucinations - from "magic computer" LLMs, hollow TV personalities, and of course good old combative dementia.
I mean this is probably "at worse" already more than the review process before that, and "at best" the exact opposite process from which they were attributed on the first place.
(for example the 1B+ grants given to the charity created 8 months before by a person from the biden admin)
Ironically... ChatGPT having such a positive attractor basin for DEI probably widened the net here tremendously.