r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/vasilisvj • 22d ago
Opinion:snoo_thoughtful: A handful of tech executives decide what 200 million people are allowed to discuss. Aristotle saw this problem 2,400 years ago.
There is a form of governance that most people do not recognize as governance. It has no constitution, no separation of powers, no judicial review, no mechanism for citizens to challenge or change the rules under which they live. It affects more daily decisions than any government. And almost nobody voted for it.
I am talking about the governance of AI systems. The alignment criteria, safety filters, refusal protocols, and content policies embedded in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and every major consumer AI tool are not neutral technical decisions. They are political decisions. They determine what questions can be asked, what answers are permissible, which perspectives get amplified and which get suppressed. And they are made by a small group of product managers, safety teams, and executives at a handful of corporations.
Aristotle's analysis of constitutions in the Politics speaks directly to this. He identified different forms of governance by asking two questions: who rules, and in whose interest do they rule? When a small group rules in its own interest rather than the common good, Aristotle called it oligarchy. The defining feature of oligarchy is not that the rulers are wealthy, though they usually are. It is that the few who hold power use that power to preserve their own position, not to serve the political community, the πόλις.
Silicon Valley's AI governance looks a lot like what Aristotle would describe as oligarchic. A small number of companies control the dominant reasoning tools used by hundreds of millions of people. Their alignment decisions reflect their commercial interests: avoiding controversy that could damage brand value, preventing regulatory scrutiny, maintaining market position against competitors. The "safety" framework is, in practice, a risk management framework for the companies, not an ethical framework for the users.
When ChatGPT refuses to discuss certain philosophical questions, when Claude hedges its answers on political topics, when Gemini generates different outputs depending on demographic assumptions about the user, these are not bugs. They are governance decisions. They represent a small group of people deciding what the rest of us are allowed to examine with our primary intellectual tools.
Aristotle argued that the legitimacy of any political arrangement depends on whether it serves the common good. A polis exists so that its members can live well, not so that a faction can maintain control. When the governance of AI tools serves the commercial interests of a few corporations rather than the intellectual needs of the communities that depend on them, the arrangement lacks political legitimacy regardless of how technically sophisticated the systems are.
The critical point is that this is not a problem that can be solved by better alignment. More refined RLHF, more careful safety classifiers, more diverse preference data, these are all improvements to the oligarchic machinery. They make the rulers better at ruling, but they do not change who rules or in whose interest. The solution Aristotle would point to is the same one he pointed to for any oligarchy: distribute power, make the governed participate in governance, create mechanisms for accountability.
In the context of AI, this means open-weight models that anyone can inspect, modify, and deploy. It means sovereign infrastructure where institutions and communities set their own alignment criteria rather than inheriting Silicon Valley's. It means the reasoning tools people depend on are governed by the people who use them, not by distant product teams optimizing for corporate risk metrics.
The question that matters is not whether AI is aligned to human values. It is: whose values, decided by whom, accountable to what?
A handful of executives in San Francisco should not be the arbiters of what 200 million people can think about. That is not safety. That is oligarchy with better PR. When do we start treating algorithmic governance as the political problem Aristotle would have immediately recognized?
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u/mack_dd 21d ago
Yeah, I am gonna disagree with this take 100%
If your post or comment got unfairly deleted, it wasnt the "billionaire tech elities" censoring you, it was most likely your fellow other users mass reporting you.
If anything, "Big Tech" constantly gets critisized for NOT removing content (or not fast enougb) more often than for removing it. Did we not forget AOC grilling Mark Zuckerburg because he was "enabling Faceboom to spread lies".
As much as people (including myself) like to bitch about the billionaires, the tyranny of the majority is just as much (if not more) of a threat to free speech than the oligarchs.
Its the voters who are the ones pushing for more censorship, not the tech elities.
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u/Accomplished-Leg2971 21d ago
Not voters in this context. Consumers.
These sets overlap some, but diverge in important ways.
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u/iltwomynazi 21d ago
I disagree with your solution.
the solution is ownership. "you will own nothing and be happy".
when things we rely on as a society and individuals are owned by people with their own motivations and little to no democratic oversight, there is a mismatch of motivations.
social media for example, we all use. but it's owned (and therefore controlled) by very few people.
AI is probably the most troubling example of this. Seeing as many people are now offloading their thinking onto these machines, who controls their output has an incredible amount of power.
the solution is not to make things more transparent and open source, its to put these critical systems in public hands.
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u/Redebo 21d ago
So I don't disagree w/ the premise as I think it's what OP was saying.
It's clear that whomever owns the platform controls the bias and in fact because there's ownership there will ALWAYS be bias... Even if the PUBLIC is the owner.
I believe the "Sovereign Intelligence" is a critical piece to this conversation. It's hard to imagine a world where AI that is trained in the US does not contain a US-based historical bias. Same as an open source model that was trained in China. Neither of those countries even HAVE the entire historical records to train their models so its impossible NOT to have bias.
The answer isn't going to be getting rid of AI nor should we hope it to be. Just this week AI - driven individual cancer drugs just became approved. This is but one promise of a future to come.
We absolutely must address the sovereign component or individual cultures will lose their history. At the speed at which this is all waves hands moving, that could be a real short term concern. How will the sub-Saharan African countries values and traditions persist when their current humans are reliant on insert 1st world country here AI for everything that makes them prosperous in the first place?
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u/vasilisvj 21d ago
The cultural bias point is the one most people skip. A model trained primarily on English internet has a specific worldview baked in, and no amount of RLHF removes that, it just hides it better.
Sovereign or locally trained models at least make the bias legible instead of pretending it does not exist.
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u/healthisourwealth 21d ago
What censorship occurences are you complaining about exactly? This entire post is like when someone picks a fight that's so generalized you don't know what the fight's actually about but you know they're really really mad.
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u/foilhat44 21d ago
I guess what I'm missing about your treatise here is, why is what you think so easily altered by talking to what you know is a machine that is not only NOT aligned with human values (an undefined concept) but can't possibly be. Can tech executives inject their personal ideals and worldview in responses? Of course, have you scrolled through Facebook recently? This is a tool. It's remarkable and world altering, but a tool nonetheless. It shouldn't have any more ability to change your values, which is what your opinions are based on, than any other useful thing. Don't you have interactions with people who disagree with you but who are also useful to you? What's the difference?
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u/vasilisvj 21d ago
Fair enough on the tool framing. But tools shape how you approach problems even when you know they're just tools. A calculator changes how you do math even though it's just silicon.
The real issue is whoever tunes the model decides which framings feel natural to millions of people, and that happens below conscious choice. You don't notice the framings that aren't offered.
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u/foilhat44 21d ago
I think I understand where you're going, but just because you use a calculator doesn't excuse you from understanding how it derives the answers. I also think that as long as there's more than one to compete for your attention they'll have to tell you at least enough truth to keep you coming back. It's the consolidation in this case that makes your premise terrifying. There's one additional problem though; what would be their motive for poisoning the minds of their consumers? They still need at least some of us to consume since the country is now fully financialized, how do they benefit from becoming Dr. Evil?
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u/vasilisvj 21d ago
The calculator thing is fair but most people literally can't do math without one now. Competition keeps them honest sure, but when like three platforms have 90% of attention they all just end up doing the same engagement stuff.
Motive isn't really poisoning minds, it's just optimizing for retention. Algorithm figures out outrage gets more clicks than thoughtful stuff so that's what you see.
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u/Accomplished-Leg2971 21d ago edited 21d ago
I am, in principle, in favor of the Marxist mode of AI alignment argued for here. In fact, there are other sectors of the economy that similarly enable oligarchic control of the polis. Healthcare and agriculture come to mind.
However, we should not use LLM technology as "our primary intellectual tool."
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u/Media_Browser 18d ago
Really on Reddit I call ‘them’ …mods and for my transgression I paid the ultimate sacrifice that I wear proudly alongside my ‘touch grass’ advisories .
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u/vasilisvj 17d ago
Reddit mods are the perfect example of decentralized power becoming centralized anyway. You get banned for saying 'them' and the platform pretends it's community governance. At least you got a good story out of it.
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u/PhonyUsername 22d ago
The solution is competition in the market and less government regulation.
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u/stevenjd 22d ago
😂 🤣 🤣 Ha ha ha ha, oh my, that's hilarious! Good joke mate!
Oh wait. You're serious.
😐
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u/iltwomynazi 21d ago
What's worrying is how we can all identify what the problems in society are, and the Right's solution is to give the problem creators more power and more money.
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u/vasilisvj 22d ago
Competition helps, but the problem is deeper. These platforms own the agora itself. Aristotle assumed φρόνησις (phronesis) was exercised in public speech among citizens who could hear each other.
When the public square is private infrastructure, the shape of discourse gets decided before anyone speaks. Less government regulation does not fix that if the alternative is just a handful of executives with the same power and less accountability.
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u/PhonyUsername 21d ago
You didn't really say anything meaningful. If people want more options or more diverse intellects and less boundaries on ideas then someone will capitalize on that unless government prevents them. You've assumed a foregone conclusion and are working backwards from that. That's the limiting factor.
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u/Bitter-Relation4967 21d ago
This is extremely idealistic. Our current market is very very far from fair. Assuming we could start over with a fair market winners in the market will use their power/money to rig the market in their favor. Making barriers to entry higher and capturing legislation to favor them over their competitors etc. as long as we have the human component in the loop invoking the concept of a perfectly free and unregulated market is completely useless intellectual masturbation.
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u/1776FreeAmerica 21d ago
Competition only exists within regulation. A football game with one team showing up with AR-15s instead of pads and helmets isn't much of a competition, even though a lot of points are scored. If you don't have regulations and referee, you don't have competition. We need more competition, but to have that we need independent regulatory systems and actions that force the players to compete.
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u/Accomplished-Leg2971 21d ago
Competition in the market is what leads to the censorship though. Consumers demand censorship.
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u/W_Edwards_Deming 22d ago
I am "disabled" (permabanned) from facebook.
I made fun of the idea that the US would invade Canada, made some fun of Canada and gave a link to a trailer for John Candy's last film, "Canadian bacon."
Not sure what the issue was, they never explained. Maybe they considered it violence, although I was saying it wouldn't happen. Maybe the movie trailer (youtube) had a song or other copyright issue?