I’d be curious to hear that podcast if you could link it. If that was genuinely his opinion, he’s missed the forest for the trees. Brand safety is the dominant factor, not “wokeness”. And certainly not by the choice of any individual programmer.

The purpose of these tools is quite plainly to replace human labor and consolidate power. So it doesn’t matter to me how “safe” the AI is if it is displacing workers and dumping them on our social safety nets. How “safe” is our world going to be if we have 25 trillionaires and the rest of us struggle to buy food? (Oh and don’t even think about growing your own, the seeds will be proprietary and land will be unaffordable.)

As long as the Left is worrying about whether the chatbots are racist, people won’t pay attention to the net effect of these tools. And if Sam Harris considers himself part of the Left he is unfortunately playing directly into their hands.