AI Searches Stumble into Old Race Debates

You might think that searching for IQ scores of different countries would bring up a mix of results. But recently, AI-powered search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have been throwing up some troubling findings. These searches have been dishing out deeply racist and long-debunked research that suggests white people are genetically superior. Patrik Hermansson, a researcher from a UK-based anti-racism group called Hope Not Hate, was looking into this issue. He was digging into a company called the Human Diversity Foundation, which is funded by a US tech billionaire who started Adult Friend Finder. This group is the modern version of the Pioneer Fund, a notorious organization from the 1930s that promoted racist ideas. Hermansson started by searching for "Pakistan IQ" on Google. Instead of a typical list, he got Google's AI-powered Overviews tool, which was turned on by default. It gave him a specific answer: 80. When he searched for "Sierra Leone IQ, " the tool was even more precise: 45. 07. The result for "Kenya IQ" was just as exact: 75. 2. These numbers were from a study published by Richard Lynn, a professor who led a movement promoting these racist ideas. Lynn was the president of the Pioneer Fund for two decades. Hermansson found it concerning that Google was serving up these controversial results. It's important to question why these AI tools are presenting such controversial data. Are these search engines inadvertently promoting outdated and harmful ideas?