How Governments Could Influence AI
Whenever you ask AI a question, what comes back isn't always neutral. In some cases, the information that guides an AI response could be manipulated. As more people look to AI for quick answers, new research from College of Arts and Sciences sociologist Hannah Waight suggests you could get a different response depending on which language you use.
Looking at 37 countries, researchers found that AI models portrayed governments and institutions with stronger media control more favorably if the conversation with AI was in a local language other than English. For example, in Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the local-language response was more favorable than the English one over 75% of the time. However, in Sweden, Finland and Norway, it fell below 50%, or no different from random chance.
The research from Waight and co-author Eddie Yang, assistant professor of political science at Purdue University, isn't evidence that AI companies intend to serve as a tool for government influence. But the study's impact is a reminder about the potential democracy and governance issues that there could be with the increasing presence of AI in our daily lives.
“In attempting to promote transparency, we should also be wary of advocating for types of state intervention which may lead to other harmful effects, such as political censorship,” Waight said. “More than anything we need broader awareness and discussion in the public sphere concerning the nature of this technology.”
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Happening at CAS
3:00–6:00 p.m.
The history department welcomes our students back to campus with a casual get-together! Join us for free pizza and beverages; learn what’s happening in the department this year; and connect with the history community.
Free and open to all history undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and staff!
4:30–7:00 p.m.
History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies invites our graduate students, faculty, and staff to a welcome back barbecue!
Spend an evening with History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Talk with old friends, meet new colleagues, and enjoy fine food and drinks.
All HIST and IRES graduate students, faculty, and staff are invited. Families warmly welcomed.
6:00–7:30 p.m.
As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, this symposium returns to the bold universal promise of 1776—the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “unalienable rights.” Cast at once as the rights of citizens of a new republic and as the rights of all of humankind, they also coexisted with a deep contradiction: the subjugation of Native Americans, enslaved people, and women. The principles at the heart of the U.S. founding launched a politics of rights whose origins and reverberations were transnational, even as access to them remained sharply unequal in practice.
“We Hold These Truths: 250 Years of the American Experiment at Home and Abroad” brings together a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and leading scholars of citizenship, political development, race, gender, immigration, and civil rights to reflect on this legacy. The panel will explore how America’s founding ideals have shaped struggles for inclusion at home and abroad, and how those ideals have been stretched, reinterpreted, and at times betrayed across two and a half centuries.
Refreshments will be available at 5:45pm.
Panelists:
Nick Kristoff - New York Times
Megan Ming Francis - University of Washington
Peter Spiro - Temple University
Carol Nackenoff - Swarthmore University
Moderator:
Dan Tichenor - UO Knight Chair
Presented by the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.
Free and open to the public. No registration required.
This event will be livestreamed and recorded. Join HERE
4:00 p.m.
The Oregon Humanities Center presents its 2026-27 endowed lectureship series centered on the theme of Reading.
We are used to thinking about reading in relation to writing, musical scores, performances, and works of cinema and art. But as social animals, we read more broadly. We read the signs. We read the landscape. We read each others’ faces and body language. We “read the room.”
Our speakers will consider how people observe, look for patterns, try to discern meaning. How does reading shape humanity, individually and collectively? What might taking an extended, intentional look at this activity—our constant reading—reveal? Using approaches honed by their disciplines, our invited speakerswill help us think about reading from a variety of directions.
Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives (Simon and Schuster), winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Books), winner for the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford American and GQ among other publications. His most recent book Alive at the End of the World (Coffee House Press) won the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry.
Saeed Jones was the 2024-2025 artist-in-residence in the Media, Health and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School. His next book Home Out There, a memoir, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press. He cohosts the podcast Vibe Check with Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford.