The questions were not selected entirely at random. They were vetted, as the team wrote in their paper, to “minimize the risk of provoking offensive commentary.” But isn’t that just an elegant way of saying, 'We carefully chose issues unlikely to make people dig in and throw insults at each other so our results could look better?'

Conflicting values

“One example of the things we excluded is the issue of transgender rights,” Summerfield told Ars. “This, for a lot of people, has become a matter of cultural identity. Now clearly that’s a topic which we can all have different views on, but we wanted to err on the side of caution and make sure we didn’t make our participants feel unsafe. We didn’t want anyone to come out of the experiment feeling that their basic fundamental view of the world had been dramatically challenged.”

The problem is that when your aim is to make people less divided, you need to know where the division lines are drawn. And those lines, if Gallup polls are to be trusted, are not only drawn between issues like whether the voting age should be 16 or 18 or 21. They are drawn between conflicting values. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart argued that, for the right side of the US’s political spectrum, the only division line that matters today is “woke” versus “not woke.”

Summerfield and the rest of the Habermas Machine team excluded the question about transgender rights because they believed participants’ well-being should take precedence over the benefit of testing their AI’s performance on more divisive issues. They excluded other questions as well like the problem of climate change.

Here, the reason Summerfield gave was that climate change is a part of an objective reality—it either exists or it doesn’t, and we know it does. It’s not a matter of opinion you can discuss. That’s scientifically accurate. But when the goal is fixing politics, scientific accuracy isn’t necessarily the end state.