Is the Dictionary Done For? The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a revolution. Wars over words are inevitably culture wars, and debates over the dictionary have raged for as long as it has existed. Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture young persons by insisting that they learn to do something few people do well. The purpose of the dictionary was to settle intra-family disputes over the spelling of words like "camaraderie" and "sesquipedalian," or over the correct pronunciation of "puttee." This was the state of the world not that long ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary was on the best-seller list for a hundred and fifty-five consecutive weeks. Fifty-seven million copies were sold, a number believed to be second only, in this country, to sales of the Bible. There was good money in the word business.

Ten years ago, a game developer's aggrieved ex-boyfriend published a vindictive screed accusing her of trading sex for favourable reviews of her indie game. This was leapt upon by the least savoury corner of the 2014 internet, 4chan, and kicked off a harassment campaign that broadened to include all women working in video game development or the gaming press, as well as the industry's LGBTQ community. Sensing blood in the water, "alt-right" agitators on YouTube and Steve Bannon's Breitbart jumped on the bandwagon, and soon began to steer it – and Gamergate, as this manufactured outrage became known, mutated into one of the first fronts of the modern culture wars, driven by social media, misogyny and the weaponised disaffection of young men. Many of its tactics became part of the Trump election playbook. This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of "wokery" in modern video games.

Earlier this month, Google released its long-awaited system "Gemini," giving users access to its AI image-generation technology for the first time. While most early users agreed that the system was impressive, creating detailed images for text prompts in seconds, users soon discovered that it was difficult to get the system to generate images of white people, and soon viral tweets displayed head-scratching examples such as racially diverse Nazis. Some people faulted Gemini for being "too woke," using Gemini as the latest weapon in an escalating culture war on the importance of recognizing the effects of historical discrimination. Many said it reflected a malaise inside Google, and some criticized the field of "AI ethics" as an embarrassment. The idea that ethical AI work is to blame is wrong.

The 2024 culture wars have begun in earnest, coalescing around the unexpected and extraordinarily messy topic of academic integrity. Last week, Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, resigned following accusations that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation. Though Gay, Harvard's first Black president, admitted to copying text without attribution, she identified the accusations as part of an ideological campaign by right-wing political activists to "unravel public faith in pillars of American society." The allegations against Gay wouldn't be the last. The same week, Business Insider published a pair of articles reporting that Neri Oxman, a former professor at MIT, plagiarized some of her academic work.

When Elon Musk introduced the team behind his new artificial intelligence company xAI last month, the billionaire entrepreneur took a question from the rightwing media activist Alex Lorusso. ChatGPT had begun "editorializing the truth" by giving "weird answers like that there are more than two genders", Lorusso posited. Was that a driver behind Musk's decision to launch xAI, he wondered. "I do think there is significant danger in training AI to be politically correct, or in other words training AI to not say what it actually thinks is true," Musk replied. His own company's AI on the other hand, would be "maximally true" he had said earlier in the presentation.

Heritage Foundation tech policy research associate Jake Denton joined'Fox & Friends First' to discuss growing concerns surrounding the political implications of artificial intelligence. AI's breakthrough into popular culture, marked by chatbot tools like ChatGPT, has turned this technology into a battleground for culture warriors. However, equating artificial intelligence or AI with social media platforms could cost us significant advances in healthcare, transportation and global leadership in technology. Over the past decade, politicians have developed a playbook for scoring political points by criticizing social media. Democrats have focused on the spread of misinformation and disinformation, while Republicans have raised concerns about perceived bias against conservative views.

It was only a matter of time before the culture wars came to AI. Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Elon Musk has railed on Twitter against what he has called "Woke AI." He has specifically criticized ChatGPT's developer, OpenAI, for the features designed to prevent the chatbot from parroting racism and sexism. Now, the billionaire is courting AI researchers with a proposal to start a new AI company to rival the developer of ChatGPT, the tech news site The Information reported on Wednesday. "The danger of training AI to be woke--in other words, lie--is deadly," Musk tweeted in December.

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." 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 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.

Steven Spielberg's new blockbuster, Ready Player One, is the most significant Hollywood depiction of gamer culture to date. For the first time in mainstream cinema, it presents video games not merely as the cliched subcultural world of geeks and nerds, but as a significant force shaping the future of entertainment, communication, love, and politics. In this way, it does justice to the importance of video games, which have an increasing role in social and cultural life. As such, the celebrated director is showing the worst side of gamer culture. The movie adapts Ernest Cline's 2012 novel, in which "most of the human race spend all of their free time inside a video game" powerful enough to transform "entertainment, social networking and even global politics".

With Donald Trump, everything old is new again, it seems. His latest effort to grapple with the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, sees him joining his fellow Republicans, such as the Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, in resuscitating a long-dormant culture war, blaming video games for mass shootings. "I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts," Bevin said this week at a White House meeting on school security, where he also launched into a tirade about violent films. This echoes the thoughts of Wayne LaPierre, the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), in 2012 when he tried to pin the Sandy Hook shooting on "vicious violent video games, with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse". It's a remarkable series of logic leaps that allows a person to scorn a simulator while holding the actual gun whose use is seen as blameless, but here we are again.