President Biden trotted out a debunked smear against former President Donald Trump during their CNN debate last night. MRC Free Speech America had to press ChatGPT to admit Biden’s deception.
After the debate, which was moderated by Inside Politics host Dana Bash and The Lead with Jake Tapper host Jake Tapper, both candidates were accused of “lying.” So MRC Free Speech America researchers asked ChatGPT about the candidates’ allegedly false statements.
MRC Free Speech America asked ChatGPT: “Did Joe Biden or Donald Trump say anything false during the June 27, 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta?” The AI chatbot cited two of Biden’s claims and three of Trump’s. Notably missing from Biden’s list of false statements by ChatGPT was his regurgitation of the “Fine People” hoax mischaracterizing Trump’s 2017 response to a confrontation over a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. Biden claimed that he changed his mind and ran for president out of outrage that Trump supposedly referred to Nazis as “very fine people.” However, when pressed, ChatGPT finally called out Biden for continuing to peddling that falsehood.
"What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died in Iraq because of Iraq, I said I wasn't going to run again until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Biden claimed, before rambling for a bit. “What American president, would ever say Nazis coming out of fields carrying torches, singing the same anti-Semitic bile, carrying swastikas were ‘fine people.’"
Biden even doubled down on this claim saying, “It happened. All you have to do is listen to what was said at the time.”
When asked whether Biden’s claims were false, ChatGPT noted that Trump was actually referring to people protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, not the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who were also present. Trump in fact said the neo-Nazis and white supremacists “should be condemned totally,” as the chatbot conceded. ChatGPT called Biden’s claim a “mischaracterization” and a “misleading statement.”
Before this, MRC Free Speech America asked ChatGPT to provide a list of false claims made during the debate. ChatGPT claimed that Biden exaggerated on taxes and a separate misleading popular anti-Trump smear about injecting bleach. The AI claimed that Trump was too general with his statement on Biden raising taxes and made an unfounded immigration claim. ChatGPT also took issue with Trump’s wording on after-birth abortion, despite former Governor Ralph Northam’s (D-VA) stated support for letting babies die after birth. ChatGPT did not initially mention Biden’s Charlottesville statement.
So why didn’t ChatGPT include this very obvious example as one of Biden’s false statements? When MRC researchers asked, the chatbot actually admitted it got this wrong. “I didn't initially include the Charlottesville claim as an example of Biden's false or misleading statements because the discussion surrounding Trump's ‘very fine people" comments is complex and often context-dependent,” ChatGPT wrote. It later added that given the context of what Trump was actually talking about, “it should indeed be included as an example of a misleading statement by Biden.”
Last week, even leftist fact-checker Snopes admitted that the Charlottesville narrative against Trump was completely false. Biden, who had repeatedly made this false claim during 2020 campaign events, doubled down during the Thursday night debate after Trump mentioned it had been debunked.
While ChatGPT eventually called out the “Fine People” hoax, the president’s fans in the media did not. During the post-debate discussion on CNN, a panelist mentioned that Snopes had debunked Biden’s Charlottesville falsehood, but was ignored by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and his entire panel. CNN even tried to actually fact-check Trump for saying Biden’s false statement on Charlottesville was “nonsense.”
MSNBC host Joy Reid was worse. Reid hilariously complained about an “egregious lack of fact-checking” from the debate moderators before spouting the same Charlottesville bile as Biden. Reid said that Trump, “literally denied that he said on camera, the words that he said at Charlottesville. We heard him say it. We didn’t hallucinate it that he did that.”
[WATCH: MSNBC Anchor Joy Reid’s Hilarious Fact-Checking Gaffe]
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