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This year at least seven states created new programs to allow parents to spend state money on nonpublic schooling and at least 10 have expanded existing programs, according to a pro-school choice organization EdChoice. In its roundup, the group called the year a watershed moment in the movement and declared 2023 the Year of Universal Choice.

In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed her top priority, a sweeping education bill, weeks after taking office. It created a universal school voucher program in the state giving families state money to spend on private schooling, raised teacher pay but made them easier to fire, and banned the teaching of gender identity to young kids as well as indoctrination and critical race theory writ large. Three other states that restricted the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation last year Iowa, Indiana, and North Carolina also created or expanded school choice programs.

The issues have also converged in the Republican presidential primary, where candidates education pitches often combine school choice and parents rights. In a speech at a major gathering of religious conservatives, the Family Research Councils Pray Vote Stand Summit, former president Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, paired attacks on LGBTQ+ inclusiveness in schools with enacting universal school choice as key planks of his proposed plan, as did some of his rivals.

Though the parents rights movement that grew during the pandemic was originally distinct from school choice, and focused more on flipping school boards and working within public schools, the movements have increasingly merged.

School choice has long been a complicated rallying cry that hasnt always fit neatly into American ideological divides. It has significant support from the religious right, who have fought to allow public funds to support religious schools. Libertarians have argued that a market of choice in schools could improve education. Many on the left have also embraced school choice as a way to help ensure children in chronically underserved poor and minority communities receive an equitable education, usually as part of a bigger effort to improve public schools.

The pandemic provided an inflection point, however, as schools faced extended closures, parents got greater insight into their childrens classes, and academic performance overall suffered. Homeschooling, absenteeism, and private schooling increased post-pandemic, while public school enrollment dropped. It was the crucible from which the parents rights movement grew, but it also fueled interest in school choice.

Its more like a perfect storm that suddenly made school choice not just more popular, but a lot of this was awareness, said Erika Sanzi, outreach director for the parental rights group Parents Defending Education and who also supports school choice.

In early 2022, the influential conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation put out a report on education titled, Time for the School Choice Movement to Embrace the Culture War. The paper made the case that pro-school choice groups in the political center and left should set aside their efforts to defend diversity programs or avoid hot-button debates and recognize that parental anger fueled by culture wars could significantly advance their cause.

Whether education reform organizations embrace cultural debates or not, the culture war is here to stay, wrote authors Jay Greene and James Paul School choice advocates are armed with an obvious solution. They should not squander the opportunity to use it.

The argument may not have resonated with groups on the left, like the National Parents Union, that see their visions of social justice and equity in education as incompatible with a parents rights movement that views equity initiatives as discriminatory against white people. But whether intentionally or coincidentally, 2023 brought a significant increase in school choice efforts alongside the surge in interest in curriculum.

I think the synergy between parental empowerment and school choice is a consequence of that [pandemic effect]. Theres much more distrust, theres much more skepticism, said Frederick M. Hess, a director of education policy at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute. Once parents got distrustful, they started looking more closely and seeing other things they dont like.

Critics of school choice argue that it is a ploy to undermine public schools by taking tax dollars out of the system to fund private or religious schools. They see a similar effort underway in the parents rights movement or perhaps even an ulterior motive of fueling school choice by sullying the reputation of public schools.

Theres an overstep of state lawmakers in some states, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters at a September breakfast briefing hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. Number one, to raise their national profile so were talking about them, and number two, because they want to see division in public schools, so they could sell the alternative, which is a private school with tuition paid for by taxpayers.

Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, fears that Democrats are playing into conservatives hands if they let Republicans frame them as pushing a leftist version of public schools. Alienating conservative parents is not helpful to Democrats cause, he said.

The right wants the left to make education a partisan issue and to say, there should be schools for Republican kids and schools for Democratic kids, Schneider said. The project for the Republican Party right now is the dismantling of public education.

He continued: What we need to hear a lot more of is how the public schools actually need to be a place where all parents see themselves as belonging.

Those on the left who support some version of school choice, however, say Democrats devotion to public education has created a blind spot causing the failure of some state-funded schools to be overlooked.

Keri Rodrigues, president and cofounder of the National Parents Union, a social justice group that pushes for overhauling schooling and a progressive version of school choice, said some of the programs pushed by Republicans that dont measure improved outcomes for students or tailor vouchers to those with the greatest need are inadequate solutions.

She faults school leaders who have reacted to the parents rights calls for greater transparency, as well as their intimidating tactics at school board meetings, by being even less forthcoming.

If you act like you have something to hide, people are going to assume youre hiding something, even if youre not, and the only disinfectant for this crap is sunlight, said Rodrigues, who also serves as a Massachusetts Democratic Committee member. Stop whining about people wanting other options and make your option a choice worth choosing.

She noted that parents of color and lower-income communities have for decades spoken up at meetings and organized for better schools only to feel ignored, while what she identified as a political campaign on the right has gotten the entire countrys attention.

Its almost offensive that generations of women who have done this work are erased because a political campaign came through, Rodrigues said. We have reduced this down to these folks who have privilege and have been able to jack the mic.

Long term, the culture war fights may fade or shapeshift. But changes to how schools are funded will prove hard to unwind, offering potentially the longest-lasting impact.

Once you get a program going, and you have students and parents who will testify to a Legislature, or you have hundreds of students who are going to show up on the steps and have their picture taken and talk about how this choice program changed their lives, it becomes much more difficult to take it away, Hess said. A lot of the other parental rights [agenda] doesnt create that same kind of constituency but choice does.

Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.

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The lasting legacy of the education culture wars may be a familiar one: school choice - The Boston Globe

Republicans have been pushing hard on parents rightsmeaning book bans and elimination of any LGBTQ+ representation or serious discussion of race from public schools. Its an effort to simultaneously fuel their base with culture war hysteria and win back the white suburban mom voting bloc with a subject theyre supposed to care about more than any other: protecting their kids.

Its a campaign thats created a great deal of noise and a series of state laws limiting what can be taught. In 2022, as far-right school board candidates took over in many places, it looked promising for Republicans. This week, though, groups like Moms for Liberty hit serious opposition, losing a substantial majority of the races where they endorsed candidates.

There are explanations for this. Most broadly, Americans are rarely quite as hateful as Republicans are banking on these days. But in the wake of Tuesdays elections, its important to talk about something else Republicans may be missing: Parents of school-age kids in 2023 are younger Gen-Xers and, increasingly, elder millennials. Those are, broadly speaking, people who have grown up and lived their whole lives on the other side of the culture war.

Every age group has its hard-right members, of course. The founders of Moms for Liberty are in their early 40s, and theyre hateful, bigoted, frightened people. But when Republicans try to use these issues to peel off swing voters in places like Loudoun County or Fairfax County, Virginia, they may not be on the friendly territory they had imagined. Part of this is the widespread failure to realize that millennials have grown up. People got so used to them being the wacky kids that its only just starting to sink in across the national discourse that millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, are full-fledged adults now. And theyve brought their formative cultural influences with them.

Theres long been a generational divide on much of this culture-war fodder, and on LGBTQ+ issues in particular. In 2006, a Gallup poll found 50% support for a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, with 47% opposed to it. In the same poll, though, A majority of women aged 18-49 say marriages between homosexual couples should be legally valid. Three years later: A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds think gay or lesbian couples should be allowed to legally marry, while support reaches only as high as 40% among the three older age groups. The 18- to 29-year-olds of 2009 are many of todays parents of school-age children, and 14 years after they reached majority support for marriage equality, the idea that their kids might go to the school library and check out a book with LGBTQ+ characters isnt that scary.

The difference between generations goes well beyond support for same-sex marriage, though. While elder millennials and young Gen-Xers arent at the core of the gender identity revolution being carried out by Gen Z, theyre not baby boomers on this issue, either. Parents of todays K-12 students went to see The Matrix in drovesand then saw its makers come out as trans women. They were at formative ages when Hilary Swank won the best actress Oscar for playing a trans man in Boys Dont Cry. They are of a similar age to prominent trans women like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock. That trans people exist and are fully human is not a brand-new idea for them, and while theres still a long way to go, polls do reflect an age gap on trans issues just as, 15 years ago, there was an age gap on marriage.

Todays parents are also exposed to what their kids are bringing home. Part of what makes Moms for Liberty members so angry is seeing the diversity of thought and identity that their kids are embracing, not so much because of teachers and librarians as because of peers and the broader youth culture. People ages 30 to 49 are more forward-thinking on trans issues than older generations, but the gap is still bigger between that age group and those ages 18 to 29. Its a pretty safe bet that if you polled 12- to 17-year-olds, thered be another jump. Many parents may struggle with how to use they/them pronouns (and be chided by their kids for it), but the ones who arent reacting with reflexive hatred and ragethe ones whose kids can talk to themare catching the edges of that gender identity revolution. Maybe they read some of the massively popular Wings of Fire books, with their panoply of LGBTQ+ characters, to or with their kids. Or were in the room as their kids watched any of the many childrens TV shows with nonbinary or gender-fluid characters, from Netflixs Ridley Jones to Disneys The Owl House.

The Moms for Liberty Republican culture-war appeal isnt just about LGBTQ+ issues, of course. Its also extremely racist. And once again, you dont have to claim that elder millennials and young Xers are immune to racism to know that they are a more racially diverse population than older generations and grew up in an increasingly racially diverse United States of America. Certainly some members of these generations are scared racists in a defensive crouch, enraged by any acknowledgement of Black and brown people in this country (again, see the founders of Moms for Liberty), and heaven knows too many white people in this age range are susceptible to I want equality for everyone but theyre demanding too much-type arguments. But people under 50 are more likely to recognize fundamental inequities in the U.S. and the need for more progress on racial equality. And, as with LGBTQ+ representation, theyre people who grew up seeing enough racial diversity in popular culture to think its weird and wrong that banning efforts are disproportionately targeting books and movies about Black and brown characters.

Todays parents of school-age children had childhoods during which The Cosby Show was the biggest show on TV year after year, then came of age during the 1990s boom in Black movies and sitcoms. Similarly, during their lives, hip-hop became widely popular with white audiences. Many other forms originated by Black musicians had become popular with white audiences over the preceding decades, of course, but in the past, it was more common for white musicians to take up and take over Black-originated forms. While there are plenty of notable white rap and hip-hop artists, it has remained a Black-owned form in a way that rock and roll, for instance, did not as it was popularized by white musicians for white audiences.

Film and television remain disproportionately white, and #OscarsSoWhite went viral in 2015 for good reason. Simple representation is not enough to fully transform peoples politics, but a lot of elder millennials and young Xers are going to bristle at the suggestion that white kids must be protected from depictions of Black and brown people.

Republicans have spent the past two years thinking theyre going to win over white suburban moms with school-based culture wars centered on a so-called parents rights argument. It seems to be a big motivating issue for the younger faction of the Republican base, and it might help the party turn out its own voters. But this arguments reach into the messy ranks of swing voters doesnt appear to be what Republicans hoped for. This weeks election results suggest that as people start paying attention to whats really going on with these policy pushes and the candidates trying to bring them to local school boards, theyre rejecting all of it.

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When Republicans target K-12 parents in culture wars, they don't know who they're dealing with - Daily Kos

A protester holds a placard during a protest against Moms For Liberty in Philadelphia.Matthew Hatcher/Sipa USA via AP

Is the parental rights movement slowing down?

In 2021, there was a broad push after the pandemic from the right to retake education institutions. Across the country, Moms for Libertya sprawling national organization the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled an anti-government extremist groupran school board candidates to challenge inclusive policies and push book bans. The group helped successfully elect conservatives. But now there seems to be less appetite for such radical policies.

There is no better example of this backlash to the backlash than elections this year in Central Bucks, Pennsylvania. Two years ago, three Republican school board candidatestwo of whom were members of a Moms for Liberty local Facebook grouprode to victory to form a 6-3 majority on the Pennsylvania school board. Upon taking control of the prized school district in a key presidential battleground state, Republicans passed a series of controversial policies to challenge and remove books and bar advocacy activities, and, more recently, were pushing for a measure to separate athletic teams on the basis of sex.

But after almost three years of seemingly never-ending negative press coverage and contentious school board meetings, voters in Central Bucks have rejected the new status quo in this weeks elections. All five Democrat school board candidates running as the CBSD Neighbors United slate won their racesincluding a first-time challenger to President Dana Hunterflipping the board.

Last night, the voters of Central Bucks sent a strong message, the groups executive committee wrote after the win. We want leaders who will serve with compassion and common sense. We want leaders who trust and value experts. We want leaders who protect our tax dollars.

I wrote earlier this week about how the Central Bucks school board election has attracted a once-unusual kind of attention and money for a down-ballot race, with more than $600,000 pouring into the dispute, and why the stakes were so high:

In the past three years, contentious disputes about race and gender, personal attacks, calls for resignation, and even paper-throwing-chair-wingingaltercationsseem to have become regular occurrencesat Central Bucks school board meetings. Once a source of pride, the 18,000-student school district sends almost90 percentof graduating high schoolers to colleges and universities and is home to some of thebesthigh schools in Pennsylvania.But it is now a cautionary talein the state and beyondfor what can happen when outside money and national extremist politics seep into local school board elections with effects that drastically change the social dynamics of a community.

In response to what many Central Bucks residents have described as the districts descent into chaos, calls for a return to normal rose ahead of the election. I long for the day that no one talks about us anymore because we are just doing the right thing all the time, Tracy Suits, a former school board president and member of the executive committee for the Neighbors United slate, told me before the election.

This isnt just a victory for me or my fellow candidates, re-elected Democrat Karen Smith said in an email. This is a victory for our students, our teachers, our support staff, and our community. With this vote, we showed that love is stronger than hate and compassion is stronger than fear. And voters made clear they will not be divided or distracted from working togetherall of usto solve the real issues facing all of our students. She vowed to work towards restoring civility to board meetings and revising policies that have so divided us over the last couple of years.

Democrats also swept school board seats in another culture wars-plagued district in Bucks County. In Pennridge, where the Republican-controlled board voted to adopt a curriculum from a conservative education consulting firm and enacted an anti-trans sports policy, Democrat candidates beat their Republican contenders to claim all five open positions, according to unofficial election results.

Paul Martino, a Doylestown venture capitalist who bankrolled the Republican slate Central Bucks Forward that included his wife Aarati, said on Facebook that he was disappointed with the outcome.

We won in 2021 and lost in 2023, he wrote. Thats 1 for 2 if I am doing my math right. We will need to figure out plan for 2025, which is EXACTLY what the Ds did the day they lost in 2021 for 2023. Republicans losses not only in school districts but also for State Supreme Court and other offices, Martino added, bodes poorly for the 2024 nominee for president.

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Pennsylvania Voters Rejected the Culture Wars in School Board ... - Mother Jones

It was among the most heated culture clashes of the 1980s: Stanfords decision in 1988 to cashier its freshman Western Civilization requirement.

If youre my age, you vividly remember the battle cry of the proponents of change: Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go.

The required reading list, which consisted of 15 classic texts, was reduced to six. Dantes Inferno was replaced by I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More were out; Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God was in. John Locke and John Stuart Mill were replaced by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and examples of Rastafarian poetry, while Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus gave way to Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth, a veritable handbook of revolutionary practice and social reorganization (according to the books dust jacket).

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The Wall Street Journals editorial board was outraged by what it saw as Stanfords decision to compromise the universitys intellectual seriousness. A number of Stanford faculty members, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian of slavery, race and gender Carl Degler, also voiced opposition to the change. With words that havent aged well, the author of books like Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States and At Odds: Women and the Family in America From the Revolution to the Present insisted that Few historians believe that the culture of this country has been seriously influenced by ideas from Africa, China, Japan or indigenous North America.

I bring up this episode because it underscores the centrality of the humanities to the late 20th centurys culture wars. At stake, many academics and intellectuals believed, was, in the words of the intellectual historian Andrew Hartman, nothing less than a war over the nations soul.

Sure, the humanities were often wielded by neoconservative editorialists and politicians as a political cudgel to attack the multicultural left. But an essential fact remains: the humanities mattered in a way that they dont today. As Hartman puts it in the second edition of his history of the culture wars of the 1970s, 80s and 90s:

A debate about whether Locke or Fanon deserves a place in a national curriculuma debate about what should constitute common knowledgecould only happen between people who share an understanding that education is a social good.

We are talking about a moment in time when a University of Chicago classicist and philosopher could write an anti-utilitarian defense of the humanities that treated learning as an erotic act and sell an astonishing 400,000 copies of the book in its first year and double that number in its second. Allan Bloom regarded a humanities education as:

A space between the intellectual wasteland [an undergraduate] has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.

The kulturkmpf of the 1970s, 80s and 90s foregrounded the humanities as they had never been foregrounded before. Perhaps you recall some of the major controversies of that era:

Sure, the humanities were often wielded by editorialists, intellectuals and policy makers as a political cudgel. That said, the humanities mattered in a way they dont today. Better to be the subject of bitter political debate than to be marginalized or dismissed as irrelevant. In Hartmans words:

The left won those culture wars. But the victories have proven Pyrrhic. These days, not enough students want to study the humanities and justify their existence to cost-conscious administrators and few public voices are heard defending them, especially conservative voices.

Superficially, todays cultural conflictsover The New York Timess 1619 Project or critical race theory or intersectionality or postmodernism or gender ideology or decolonizationresemble those of three, four or five decades ago. Yet something profound has changed. As Hartman explains, some of the older struggles subsided due to the progressive lefts success in taking over major cultural institutionsart museums and foundations, as well as many academic humanities programs and professional societies. At the same time, economic anxiety and class resentment have mapped onto cultural divisions to make the culture wars angrier [and] more tribal.

Then theres the growing prevalence of political theater. Thanks, in part, to social media and the internet, public debates today favor the sensational over the substantive, the superficial over the serious and the visceral over the thoughtful. Hyperbole, overstatement, deliberate provocation are the order of the day. The academy has, I fear, fanned the flames, with activist scholars blurring the line between political action and scholarly claims, further debasing public discourse.

The temptation to speak out, even among those with no special expertise or insight, is apparently unstoppable. Artists, authors, intellectuals, professors and scholarly associations are signing open letters. Their purpose is a bit unclear, apart from simply saying something, showing their allegiance, signaling their virtue and engaging in a bit of self-promotion and networking.

With acid words, Nina Power, the English philosopher, writes, For someone working in the culture industries, the only thing worse than having the wrong position on a political controversy is having no position at all. These figures feel impelled to pronounce on anything and everything, staking a political stand on matters ranging from microaggressions to macropolitics. She is struck by the seeming hypocrisy of those who in the past de-platformed, ostracized and deprived of income, that is, canceled, others, who now speak out against what they regard as a new McCarthyism.

What happened?

James Davison Hunter, a professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, offered an explanation in an important if now largely forgotten 2017 Washington Post essay. In this piece, the author of a classic 1991 study, Culture Wars, traces how the earlier conflicta battle over sexuality, religion, family and the humanitiesmorphed and metastasized into a class war over globalization, immigration and the changing boundaries of legitimate pluralism, pitting the college-educated professional class against the non-college-educated lower middle and working classes.

For many middle- and low-wage workers, stagnating wages, declining union membership, lost manufacturing jobs and soaring income inequality undercut their hopes for a better life. Even worse, these groups saw their values and beliefs ridiculed as bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic and backward by a relatively privileged and powerful elite.

Hunter cited a UVA survey that reported that seven of 10 of the less educated believe that the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good. Cynicism, mistrust and a sense of powerlessness were much higher among those with lower levels of schooling:

The poorly educated are one and a half times more likely than the college educated to hold the highest levels of distrust of the government; nearly three times more likely to be highly cynical of politicians; and over twice as likely to express the highest levels of alienation from the political process. Among the poorly educated who are religiously conservative, the levels of distrust, cynicism and alienation are even higher.

The cultural and class divide has had profound consequences for the humanities.

Today, the humanities increasingly exist on the cultures margins, with humanities faculty largely dismissed as politically predictable, their professional societies regarded as hyperpoliticized, their scholarship treated as irrelevant at best and partisan claptrap at worst.

Not surprisingly, humanists voices grow ever louder as their impact and influence grows progressively weaker.

To be sure, the most vocal attacks on the humanities are found in red states like Florida. But the real threats to the humanitiesthe continued decline in majors, the downsizing and even closure of departments, the increasing reliance on adjuncts, falling sales of academic books in humanities disciplines, flagging attendance at professional meetings, and shifting gen ed courses into high schoolis occurring apace in the blue states, too. Equally worrisome is the fact that the programs that do attract a growing number of undergraduates, including those in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality, increasingly think of themselves as part of the social sciences, not the humanities.

In a recent essay on the humanities future, the Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat makes a powerful case that in an era of scarcer resources, declining birth rates, sustained political conflict and students seeking a marketable credential, the humanities need Republican friends.

Instead, he avers, the humanities are doing a lot to alienate potential supporters. He quotes at length Tyler Austin Harper, an environmental studies professor at Bates College and a man of the left:

How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost? Universities have always been tacitly left-leaning and faculty have always been openly so, but institutions have never been this transparently, officially political. Almost every single job ad in my field/related fields this year has some kind of brazenly politicized language.

Our society desperately needs the humanities and a functional public higher education system more broadly. And at the very moment were under sustained assault, some of us are still pouring fuel on Chris Rufos bonfire.

Douthat makes it clear that humanities programs cant build support among those who want to demote higher ed into a high-class trade school offering vocational training and building human capital, no matter how much we speak about imparting transferable skills or instilling critical thinking abilities or cross-cultural competencies.

But there are other conservatives who do respect the traditional value of a humanities education: cultural literacy, aesthetic appreciation, civic-mindedness, ethical thinking and historical perspective. Shouldnt we do more to appeal to those people, too?

What these folks wantand what I also desireis a greater emphasis on rigor, analysis, writing and communicating. Dont worry: imparting those skills wont make the humanities disciplines instrumental. Especially in the age of generative AI, when coding might be replaced by Alexa-like human commands, its hard for anyone in any political party to say, well, we dont need creative thinkers anymore or problem solvers, just coders/engineers.

Sure, students can read literature or history or popular philosophy books and visit museums on their own. But much of what I most enjoyed about my humanities classes was responding to the same work together, discussing it and having others to bounce ideas off. Or, in the case of experiencing an opera or film or other artistic work, bearing witness to something magical together.

The real failure of those of us who teach in the humanities today is not partisanship or politicization or an embrace of postmodern relativism. Its that as a result of hyperspecialization, prioritization of research over teaching and mentoring, and the production of scholarship inaccessible to a broader public, weve lost sight of the humanities true purpose.

That purpose is to understand the human experience in its complexity across time and place, to cultivate empathy and ethical insight, nurture aesthetic sensibilities, preserve collective memory and achievements, encourage social critique, inspire creativity and debate enduring questions about beauty, divinity, evil, human nature, justice and morality.

Disagree with this understanding of the humanities purpose if you wish. Treat the humanities as a pathway to advocacy and social justice if you will. But if you do that , dont be surprised to find our fields pushed even more into the cultures margins.

Youll be free to pontificate as you wish, but no one will be listening.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Excerpt from:
The culture war, version 2.0 - Inside Higher Ed

With help from Derek Robertson

Elon Musk. | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

This weekend, Elon Musk unveiled the beta version of Grok, his new AI chatbot, which drew deeply on science fiction references: the bots name refers to the Martian science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Musks early pitches for the project emphasized how politically different it would be from existing chatbots like ChatGPT. He unveiled it in an April interview with conservative pundit Tucker Carlson in which he described his interest in AI as motivated by fears that existing models, like the ones created by OpenAI, were baking in lefty bias. Im worried about the fact that its being trained to be politically correct, he said.

But his latest framing offers a vision of the future that is more, well, future-y. Per this weekends announcement, Grok has been released to a small number of users for beta testing, with plans to roll it out to premium subscribers of X, formerly known as Twitter.

In unveiling the bot on Saturday, Musks firm, xAI, cited a very different kind of inspiration: Grok, the announcement began, is an AI modeled after the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Tech industry watchers say there is a good reason for this evolution. While stoking culture war controversy can help generate buzz, many are skeptical outrage can attract a large number of users.

Sarcastic replies will entertain Musk superfans, but theyll ultimately be measured by their accuracy, said Nu Wexler, a former Senate staffer who has worked at Facebook and Twitter. Like social media platforms and search engines, theres not a big market for anti-woke AI, or any chatbots with a distinct political bent.

Musks brand has long been wrapped up in the futuristic technologies produced by his companies, which he has tied to long-term goals for the future, like colonizing the solar system.

In recent years, though, his public persona has become more political. Hes become an outspoken critic of progressive mores, describing his acquisition of Twitter since rebranded as X last year as part of a quest to defeat the woke mind virus. Musk has tied his anti-woke quest to his hands-off approach to moderation, an approach that has also allowed him to cut costs and led to a European Commission investigation of Xs compliance with the continents digital content rules.

With Grok, Musk appears to have taken a new tack. He has pledged Grok will be based (the antonym of woke in online slang), but hes leading his pitch with the vaguer offer that Grok will be spicy.

The bot is not yet widely available for testing, but so far spicy seems to be more PG-13 than politically explosive.

Asked for help making cocaine, in one exchange highlighted by Musk, Grok offered vague instructions like obtain a chemistry degree before adding Just kidding and adding a disclaimer that disavows illegal activity. Another Grok answer that Musk tweeted compared a computer programming challenge to trying to keep up with a never-ending orgy.

Oh this is gonna be fun Musk remarked.

What about the technicals? One of the big selling points touted this weekend was the capability to use data from X to provide up-to-date responses. OpenAIs ChatGPT does not incorporate information about events that have occurred in recent months. GPT-4 cited an April 2023 cutoff when explaining that it could not respond to DFDs request to discuss the recent news about Grok.

But that would not exactly revolutionize the current state of AI. Microsoft Bings Copilot, for one, already offers responses that incorporate information about recent events. Asked by DFD Monday morning about the release, Copilot responded, Grok is being trained by having real-time access to information from the platform, meaning X, before going on to cite more details of the rival chatbots release.

So for the moment, Musks promise for the future of AI is leaning heavily into zaniness and cinematic allusion. Hes also invoked Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey in discussing his AI ambitions. What if they just one day get a software update and theyre not so friendly anymore? Musk mused in a conversation with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday, Then weve got a [Terminator director] James Cameron movie on our hands.

Given Musks sweeping ambitions for his AI, its probably not a bad thing that hes mining sci-fi for scenarios to avoid: For one thing, he tweeted this weekend that hed like to one day integrate Grok into his Tesla vehicles.

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CTIA Wireless Foundation is at the forefront of social innovation powered by wireless. Its signature initiative, Catalyst, is a grant program accelerating mobile-first solutions to pressing challenges in American communities. The Catalyst 2023 Winners are using 5G to address cyberbullying, education inequities and veterans mental health. Learn more.

As AI policy fights take over Washington, K Street is cashing in.

POLITICOs Hailey Fuchs and Brendan Bordelon reported over the weekend on how the growing field of AI policy has all the makings of a big payday for the lobbying industry think the crypto lobbying blitz, but bigger.

Hailey and Brendan write that AI lobbyists say nearly every industry has realized it will have to reckon with AI, with groups from Nike to the Mayo Clinic looking for an information advantage. But theres just one problem, at least for now: institutional Washington isnt exactly crawling with AI experts.

Every lobbying firm in town is trying to make themselves out to be an expert in everything to try and lure in clients, so AI is just one of them, one lobbyist said. Id be hard-pressed to name you an AI expert downtown. Its hard enough to pick the AI experts in policymaking positions. Derek Robertson

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Now that last weeks AI Safety Summit is over, whats going to actually happen?

POLITICOs Morning Tech U.K. newsletter recapped some of the actionables this morning, from international research collaborations to the important topics that didnt get covered during the summit. A few of their takeaways:

Setting up a research network. The Bletchley Declaration called for a research group meant to complement all involved countries AI safety programs. A difficult enough task in its own right, this group also notably includes China, with whom there are plenty of barriers to that level of cooperation already.

Pulling together a report. And that research partnership also calls for a state of the science report on frontier model capabilities and risks. Mariano-Florentino Cullar, president of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the key advocates for this push, called for reports at a pace of every one to six months.

Oh yeah, and killer robots. The military use of AI went strangely undiscussed at a summit ostensibly all about safety. Also last week, the United States made a declaration on responsible military use of AI that 31 countries have already endorsed.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([emailprotected]); Derek Robertson ([emailprotected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([emailprotected]); Steve Heuser ([emailprotected]); Nate Robson ([emailprotected]) and Daniella Cheslow ([emailprotected]).

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