2084
The famous Orwellian masterpiece opens with the protagonist Winston Smith walking through the street on a cold day in April. He can't help but notice a "poster with an enormous face gazing from the wall" with the caption "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU."
Fear and punishment are what make people afraid, confused, and isolated in Orwell's 1984, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian superstate controlling society. However, if Orwell had taken a shot at it again today, his take would be quite different. In 2084 BIG BROTHER won't need posters, megaphones, or cameras. He will only need AI.
Chatbots are powerful. They can help you draft ideas, fix grammar mistakes, and do real work for you. But they are also extremely dangerous. Unlike search, the chatbot interface is more like the way humans interact with each other. That's why companion and tutoring platforms are emerging from them. A more human experience can make learning or entertainment more immersive, but it also holds massive potential to manipulate masses and cause what Chomsky calls the manufacturing of consent.
A study from Yale, published in PNAS Nexus, is already bringing this to light, showing that AI has inherent biases caused by the distribution of its data. "We show that using chatbots to learn about history has unanticipated and anticipated influences on people's opinions." Researchers conducted a study that showed the effect was modest but statistically significant: default AI summaries shifted opinion scores from 3.47 to 3.57 on a 5-point ideological scale. This suggested that AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have the power to tune their models to selective opinions, adding another lever in the manufacturing of consent.
A tool this powerful is, however, in the hands of a few corporations that now control the power to censor and uncensor on a whim. We started an initiative to stop inference from being controlled by a few. Ghostral is an initiative to build a decentralized inference network that cannot be manipulated by any external entity. We are starting by releasing Ghostral, an AI platform that doesn't log or store your conversation. Chats are stored locally on your computer and computation is run on the leading open source that match agentic capabilities of the closed source models. Both the backend and the frontend are also open-sourced and we encourage contributors to improve the platform.
Switch away from ChatGPT or Anthropic and join Ghostral to help us build our mission to advance cryptographic AI, decentralized inference research, and democracy.
Read more about how we plan to do this here.