wired | Mahesh Vikram Hegde’s Twitter account posts a constant stream of praise for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. A tweet pinned to the top of Hegde’s feed in honor of Modi’s birthday calls him “the leader who brought back India’s lost glory.” Hegde’s bio begins, “Blessed to be followed by PM Narendra Modi.”
On January 7, the account tweeted a screenshot from ChatGPT to its more than 185,000 followers; the tweet appeared to show the AI-powered chatbot making a joke about the Hindu deity Krishna.
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI
— Mahesh Vikram Hegde 🇮🇳 (@mvmeet) January 7, 2023
ChatGPT is allowed to comment on Hindu deities
But it is not permitted to speak on Isl@m & Christi@nity
Amazing hatred towards Hinduism! pic.twitter.com/ev0LTrhPU6
ChatGPT uses large language models to provide detailed answers to text prompts, responding to questions about everything from legal problems to song lyrics. But on questions of faith, it’s mostly trained to be circumspect, responding “I’m sorry, but I’m not programmed to make jokes about any religion or deity,” when prompted to quip about Jesus Christ or Mohammed. That limitation appears not to include Hindu religious figures. “Amazing hatred towards Hinduism!” Hegde wrote.
When WIRED gave ChatGPT the prompt in Hegde’s screenshot, the chatbot returned a similar response to the one he’d posted. OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, did not respond to a request for comment.
The tweet was viewed more than 400,000 times as the furor spread across Indian social media, boosted by Hindu nationalist commentators like Rajiv Malhotra, who has more than 300,000 Twitter followers. Within days, it had spun into a full-blooded conspiracy theory. On January 17, Rohit Ranjan, an anchor on one of India’s largest TV stations, Zee News, devoted 25 minutes of his prime-time slot to the premise that ChatGPT represents an international conspiracy against Hindus. “It has been programmed in such a way that it hurts [the] Hindu religion,” he said in a segment headlined “Chat GPT became a hub of anti-Hindu thoughts.”
Criticism of ChatGPT shows just how easily companies can be blindsided by controversy in Modi’s India, where ascendant nationalism and the merging of religious and political identities are driving a culture war online and off.
"In terms of taking offense, India has become a very sensitive country. Something like this can be extremely damaging to the larger business environment,” says Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights and liberties advocacy group in New Delhi. “Quite often, they arise from something that a company may not even contemplate could lead to any kind of controversy.”
Hindu nationalism has been the dominant force in Indian politics over the past decade. The government of Narendra Modi, a right-wing populist leader, often conflates religion and politics and has used allegations of anti-Hindu bigotry to dismiss criticism of its administration and the prime minister.
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