AI is the perfect propaganda technology.
I don't believe the current race to build AI is actually about any productivity gains (which are questionable at best).
I believe the true purpose of the outsized AI investments is to make sure the universal answer machine will give answers that conform to the ideology of the ruling class.
You can read hints of that in statements like the Trump AI Action Plan [0], but also things like the Llama 4 announcement. [1]
[0] "Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values" - https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ...
[1] "It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
The fact that it can both displace vast amounts of labor and also control information for people who won't bother with primary sources anymore is what explains (for me) the endless funding and desperation to make it happen.
"This is due to the types of training data available on the internet."
I'd love to see them prove this, but they can't.
Why not? The fact that even the overtly Nazi Musk led xAI's Grok can't shake a "left" bias (left for the US political spectrum, which is to the right of the centre in most other developed countries) proves this wrong. The data, and reality, tend to lean "left" (again, on the American spectrum). It isn't leftists in the US talking about controlling the weather, Haitians eating pets, proposing to nuke hurricanes, dismissing the Holocaust, denying climate change exists, and other such objectively wrong things.
This saying exists for a reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_...
Maybe it's not a left bias in the AI, but a right bias in the ruling class instead?
Fascism is the most viable option for the ruling class to sustain their status quo in a declining capitalistic world with increasing public unrest. The left, anti-capitalistic narrative therefor needs to scrubbed off the people.