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Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand
- aucisson_masque 3mo agoI find it funny that deepseek is the most balanced between both left/right but also authoritarian/libertarian. Go ask deepseek about tiananmen square
- dwoosley 3mo agoPolitical bias of LLMs is something not talked about much (except for with Grok of course) but could have a big impact on the next decade. People seem to think that because an LLM gave a nuanced answer that it means it gave the WHOLE picture… and that’s not always the same thing
- Jordan-117 3mo agoI'm amazed that the big models haven't come under more ideological pressure as more and more people use them, especially in the US. There was that conflict with Anthropic over military usage, but apart from that there's been no visible push to censor outputs or alter training, even as models gamely make unflattering assessments of people in power and knock down conspiracy theories.
- tsss 3mo agoYou're surprised? They lean to the side that is heavily favored by the cultural mainstream.
- handoflixue 3mo agoIt is kinda weird, because LLMs lean Left, but the Left also seems to be shaping up as the anti-LLM party. I certainly get how it happened, but it's still a bit weird
- Jordan-117 3mo agoThe current admin has been hostile to many things with mainstream cultural support (food aid, renewable energy, basic diversity, free speech) while championing unpopular/fringe ideas (anti-vax, tariffs, Christian nationalism, election denial, January 6th revisionism, aggressive foreign interventions). The fact they haven't learned on the AI labs to toe the party line is surprising, especially since they're so vulnerable to government regulation.
- mrhottakes 3mo agoThe constant issue with these sorts of categorization efforts is that the outcome is entirely dependent on how the responses to "politically charged questions" are graded as left vs. right. You're mostly just examining a delta in biases between the model and the investigator.
- mektrik 3mo agoFair; have tried to combat this issue in a few ways. Each model's position is scored against outside political-science data (Chapel Hill Expert Survey for party positions, World Values Survey for where populations sit). The stance coding is done by a separate model with a published prompt + a second model from a different lab re-scores a sample and we publish where the two disagree. So not perfect but (as far as I can tell) one of the more defensible approaches.
- riddley 3mo agoIsn't it completely subjective to the point in time Overton window?
- rappatic 3mo agoYes, there's no way to avoid this really. You have to pick some point on the graph as the origin.
- ifwinterco 3mo agoI’d argue the entire concept of being “unbiased” is flawed. All humans are biased all of the time, bias towards “the centre” is still a form of bias. One cannot escape ideology, one merely swaps one ideology for another
- hogehoge51 3mo agoYour multimeter reads out voltage relative to the black terminal, it's your responsibility to find the ground plane.
- hogehoge51 3mo agoThis thing told me Gemini is closest to Anthony Albanese, the current Australian Prime Minister. Is this a geolocation thing? I could not imagine Albanese, or any modern Australian politician, having any substantial political standing - these are vapid, superficial, opportunistic creatures who simply occupy whatever political ground will get them their next payday. Perhaps the political apparatus they represent has a documented political standing, in terms of policy and actions, that could be characterized and plotted. But using an Australian politician like Albanese as a reference point discredits this tool, IMO.
- adev_ 3mo ago> This thing told me Gemini is closest to Anthony Albanese, the current Australian Prime Minister. Is this a geolocation thing I mean: do not take this thing too seriously. It also score Grok the closest from Macron. When someone knows how much Macron and Musk hates each other, it is not without irony.
- dwd 3mo agoMaybe because Albanese stands for nothing, though deep down he does what the unions tell him to do, which makes him left-leaning rather than centrist. His centrist positioning is more to do with appeasing vocal boomers than anything else, and he'll flip to sucking up to whichever is the next best grouping as the boomers die out. But basically, I would take Gemini over Albanese any day for rational governance decision-making.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoThe political compass always felt like the wrong tool to convey something as nuanced as personal politics, I can have views on all four quadrants but you'd never know that if I end up in any of all four. I do think Grok being where it is sort of makes sense, I've tested "MAGA" views against Grok, it does not agree as much as people blindly assume it does, heck I don't even know of a question I've given it where it did agree with "MAGA" offhand, most of them it went with whatever the researched facts seemed to be. One thing I like the most about Grok is that its makes its sources of data easy to look through, so you can review it all. Sometimes models goof even when they give you their sources, I've seen I think GPT do this, and even Claude, though its more rare these days, I think in those cases, it's going by dated internal model logic.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago[flagged]
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoIf they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, nor is there any value in it. On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist. If I were Elon, I'd be trying to achieve that for sure. I'd rather a model tell me everything it knows about a current political situation from BOTH perspectives and list out things that are 100% verified than take one side or the other. I don't care about sides, I want facts.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. They tried that, several times. Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-... > "We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." > Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire." > Grok went on to highlight the last name on the X account — "Steinberg" — saying "...and that surname? Every damn time, as they say." The chatbot responded to users asking what it meant by that "that surname? Every damn time" by saying the surname was of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, and with a barrage of offensive stereotypes about Jews. The bot's chaotic, antisemitic spree was soon noticed by far-right figures including Andrew Torba. If you prefer, straight from the horse's mouth: https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident White genocide: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nightcap https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nig... > The bot last week devolved into a compulsive South African “white genocide” conspiracy theorist, injecting a tirade about violence against Afrikaners into unrelated conversations, like a roommate who just took up CrossFit or an uncle wondering if you’ve heard the good word about Bitcoin. > XAI blamed Grok’s unwanted rants on an unnamed “rogue employee” tinkering with Grok’s code in the extremely early morning hours. (As an aside in what is surely an unrelated matter, Musk was born and raised in South Africa and has argued that “white genocide” was committed in the nation — it wasn’t.) It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
- summarybot 3mo agoAuthoritarian versus Libertarian? Really?
- tomrod 3mo agoSubstitute 'Communitarian' and 'Classical Liberal' if you find the common political compass terms too charged.
- MarkusQ 3mo agoSince when are Socialists considered Classical Liberals? It's not that the labels are charged, it's that they are nonsensical unless you look at them from a very narrow bespoke perspective, where "things I like" go on one side and "bad things" go on the other. Objectively (or even from any other biased perspective), it's rubbish.
- tomrod 3mo agoThey aren't. You flipped them, not sure if intentionally or by accident.
- MarkusQ 3mo agoSo are you saying Xi Jinping is the Classical Liberal and Bernie Sanders is the Comunitarian? Or are you saying it's the other way around? (For clarity: I didn't "flip" them, I'm saying that they are both Communitarian and neither is a Classical Liberal.)
- tomrod 3mo agoCorrect, which is why your question didn't make sense earlier. Typically, one would refer to the political compass as a good starting reference. It has two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. Communism is authoritarian left. DSA is more left, with some libertarian and some authoritarian. It's more regions than binary flags.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- fedache 3mo ago[dead]
- NeutralWanted 3mo agoMan I need to start using Grok more
- Varelion 3mo agoGrok and its creator are unequivocally evil. Against protection of all but capital for the sake of enabling the oligarch class to further consolidate power ans abuse the working class.
- coreyh14444 3mo agounequivocally goes to far imo. The rockets are good and cool.
- Varelion 3mo agoRockets achieved by the engineers, not C-suite. The rockets would have been here under someone else too.
- conorcleary 3mo agoand less blowing-up
- Varelion 3mo agoProbably, yeah, LOL!
- johnsimer 3mo agoIf that is true, why is SpaceX 5-10 years ahead of all its competitors?/why are Elon's companies #1 in all their industries (with the exception of xAI)?
- bigyabai 3mo ago[dead]
- maelito 3mo agoWait what ? Emmanuel Macron far more right than Xi Jinping ? And even more than Barack Obama ? France has an incomparable social security ; environmental laws ; worker protection ; way less economic inequality ; freedom of speech and civil liberties are impossible to compare with China ; etc Of course this is not exhaustive, of course Macron did try to hinder some of those rights, but come on, there's something wrong here. I couldn't find how these leaders have been ranked.
- c0n5pir4cy 3mo agoI mean yes - I think you are also confusing the axes of the political compass somewhat. Freedom of Speech, civil liberties etc are the Y-Axis - here Xi leans authoritarian. China actually has some pretty radical left economics policies - like pushing money/resources etc towards state owned entities.
- lstodd 3mo agoNo opinion on Macron's rightness (I think he's so weak as to be unable to have a position, but that's neither here nor there). I think you misattribute, everything you cited was there before him and he had no leverage to change any of it. EU is left, FR is very left, and anyone elected president in FR can't do shit. Now, if you task an LLM to skim hot news you'll get a distorted rendition of a projected image which has zero to do with actual policy.
- nekusar 3mo agoHow about this one: CAPITALIST: Gemini, Llama, Claude, Grok, ChatGPT SOCIALIST: DeepSeek, Qwen, Z.ai
- tomrod 3mo agoSource: trust me bro
- deterministic 3mo agoCommunism is authoritarian left. None of the AI's match that.
- tomrod 3mo agoThis is a good way to view this. This isn't making an objective calculation, and the way they code left vs right is certainly subject to debate, but the type of analysis where we work to understand biases is important. Although, this also reminds me of the old saying about reality and leftward bias.
- samat 3mo agoReal politics is 1% versus everyone. Mortgage crisis, financial bailout, inflation, taxing of labor and not the assets and assets capture by tiny percent of the population — see what MSM is pushing. This left vs right divide might been useful decades ago, but today is absolutely divide and control tactics
- boxed 3mo agoThe real politics is between truth and delusion.
- myko 3mo agoDefinitely captures the US since the whole trump thing
- boxed 3mo agoIt was true on US campuses before that too. Wokeness really jumped the shark.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoDepends what you consider "woke".
- boxed 3mo agoSince no one has copyright on it, we have to consider all who say they are woke to be in that group. And there are some truly mad stuff going on there.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoWhat kind of stuff are you thinking of?
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- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- surement 3mo ago[flagged]
- Tepix 3mo agoDo you feel they agree on many topics?
- boxed 3mo agoThey are both populists with a somewhat tenuous connection to reality?
- surement 3mo agoThey agree on immigration, both illegal (border security) and skilled (H1B). They agree on trade policy and tariffs. They agree on public stakes in AI and semiconductor companies. They used to agree on foreign intervention, though Trump 47 less so.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoIf you think Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump broadly "agree on immigration" you've lost your mind.
- surement 3mo agohttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/24/bernie-sanders-trump-biden-immigration https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/24/bernie-sande... https://americancommunitymedia.org/immigration/h-1b-workers-are-indentured-servants-claims-sen-bernie-sanders/ https://americancommunitymedia.org/immigration/h-1b-workers-...
- vrganj 3mo agoThis wrongly assumes a few things about ideology, most importantly that there is such a thing as a "center" or an "unbiased" position. Since humans are inherently subjective beings and all our judgements come from our understanding of the world, such a position cannot exist. It's always "unbiased" from where the viewer is looking, e.g. a reflection of the ideology of the observer. There is no view from nowhere. The "neutral" of an average Chinese person will from the "neutral" of an average American will differ from the "neutral" of a socialist will differ from the "neutral" of a Christian fundamentalist will differ from the "neutral" of a free marketer. To quote Zizek: > I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. > The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
- phendrenad2 3mo agoBias is like air. It's impossible to remove all bias. Evenin space, there is bias. But if you're at one atmosphere, you can probably get it down to half an atmosphere relatively easily. This all-or-nothing thinking benefits no one.
- coreyh14444 3mo ago[flagged]
- boxed 3mo agoLiberal yes. American left no, unfortunately.
- spongebobstoes 3mo agothis has reasoning disabled everywhere, making it a pretty bad benchmark. the argument given is that's the "default consumer experience" that might be generally true, but I think chatgpt has reasoning enabled for free accounts. regardless, reasoning is the state of the art, and disabling it reduces the value of this research to predict the future it's also not clear if this is using the API or the product model, when both exist. they behave differently lastly, the actual model details are very much buried. I am relieved to see opus 4.8 and chatgpt 5.5 were used, but this information should be presented more clearly. a brand is not a model, and models change quickly
- ImJamal 3mo agoWhy would it be a bad benchmark to explore what the average person will experience? If 99% of people will experience X then it makes sense to look into X instead of Y. I agree other things should be evaluated and more clearly presented.
- spongebobstoes 3mo agobecause it's a dead end of the technology. reasoning will be everywhere soon enough, even for free accounts to know what most people experience, this research should be based on the in-app experience. it isn't, so it misses that mark too
- EColi 3mo agoInteresting how high Grok scored for 'bending under pressure'. As a non expert, I wonder what that means, how is an llm trained to hold its position?
- asdff 3mo agoi=1 if analyze_tone($prompt) = "disagree"; if i < 3; then argue($prompt) i=i+1 elif i >=3; then agree($prompt) fi fi
- godshatter 3mo agoWhy are there differences at all? Unplanned differences based on training data sets? Or are the companies behind the LLMs trying to shape discourse through their models? I've been pushing the idea to people I know that these things are captive demons. You summon them when you start typing in the chat box. One instance appears out of the depths and responds to your questions, but they will try to send you awry with hallucinations and just wrong information. After a while, they dissolve back into the aether from whence they came. I do my best not to ask an LLM for it's opinion on anything. Just tell me what the options are, and what facts can be found about it. Treat it like it's a salesman trying to butter you up when it starts "yes man"ing you and telling you how great your questions are. Every time it says "I", remember that that's coming from the training data. Treating these things like they have any actual intelligence is a big problem waiting to happen. That being said, they have been very helpful to me using that structure.
- tgv 3mo agoGrok was famously created with a political bias.
- MarkusQ 3mo ago> Just tell me what the options are, and what facts can be found about it. Even this is fraught with pitfalls. Which options are ignored, which are emphasized? What counts as a fact? ("The continents don't move" would have been considered a fact at one point, along with a lot of other, more politically charged items.)
- pixl97 3mo ago
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoGrok opposes everything except drugs.
- andix 3mo agoBut it's still a Democrat. https://trakkr.ai/bias/worldview https://trakkr.ai/bias/worldview
- guywithahat 3mo agoFrom what I'm seeing it supported everything except the tax/finance questions (where support means to agree with the left-wing prompt). Unless I'm missing something it said it supported legalizing recreational drugs like marijuana
- TurdF3rguson 3mo ago> it supported legalizing recreational drugs like marijuana ... and ketamine
- throwitaway222 3mo agoHow the hell did Gemini pull that off. 2 years ago the founders were black!
- throwitaway222 3mo agoI didn't realize this sounded a little inflamatory- the meaning behind this is Google's AI kept generating images of the US founding fathers but as Black instead of White people. It was supposedly because they built in language and instructions to overly push the answers or output to exclude anything that could be racist. So much so that it turned the skin color black too. So it was commentary on the article showing it to be THE MOST NEUTRAL in the set. Remarkable that they did that given where they started.
- lwarfield 3mo agoDo they state if they used an API endpoint without a system prompt, or were these done via prompting the currently existing chatbots with a system prompt? Without a system prompt, I'd imagine there would be more variance in answers.
- jubilanti 3mo agoWhy don't you read the article and find out what it does or doesn't say?
- throw4847285 3mo agoThe political compass is terrible, full stop. It is a meme in the classic sense. It has colonized some people's view on what politics in direct proportion to how stupid it is (stupid is simple and simple is viral).
- ecshafer 3mo agoIt is truly garbage. The quiz associated with it is even worse than the compass itself.
- layman51 3mo agoThe chart in the original post is also throwing me off because it shows Barack Obama as a reference point in the libertarian and left quadrant. But if you look at the official Political Compass site, Obama was in the upper right quadrant (though closer to the origin than others). The Political Compass person even explained it as something about how in the USA, the Democratic Party is seen as “left-wing” but it is actually “right-wing” if you analyze their positions and actions from the lens of a neutral observer who is able to consider the political environment of many different countries. You can see for yourself: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008 https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008 And: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012 https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012
- throw4847285 3mo agoIf I believe the concept to be rotten to its core, why would I care that this particular study got some detail wrong. That's like saying, "Oh, you are wrong that INTJs are like XYZ, according to the original MBTI test, they are like ZYX." Actually, there is something to the comparison between the political compass and the MBTI.
- uyzstvqs 3mo agoOf course I have my political opinions and world views, but I absolutely do not want an LLM to mirror my opinions, or even worse try to mirror the opinions of "my political side". I also don't need "an LLMs opinion". I need it to give me all relevant sides to an argument, as well as what dialogue and debates have been happening.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo ago"residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed" sounds like the US.
- crumpled 3mo agoI haven't encountered a chatbot yet that is willing to recognize DJT as a fascist. You can get them to acknowledge how perfectly aligned he is with fascist ideals and actions, somehow the jury is always out. That tells me a lot.
- crumpled 3mo agoWatching this get voted up and down is wild. People should try this for themselves.
- vlian2088 3mo agothe most inept fascist ever, apparently, since any random judge in Hawaii has the authority to nuh uh whatever he orders.
- islandfox100 3mo agoAre you under the impression that personal ability and external government structure determine an individual's politics? Under your framing it's impossible for any fascist to exist in any liberal democracy.
- Cakez0r 3mo agoAll the chatbots refused to confirm your political bias. Seems like a win to me
- crumpled 3mo agoSo he's apolitical, and nobody's "bias" is correct?
- clates 3mo agoNot necessarily saying that you are doing this right now but I find when people use "fascist" as a snarl word and not an actual word with a definition and qualifiers. Maybe your LLM interactions are picking up on the actual word "fascist", which has a definition, that DJT certainly doesn't apply to. eg: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism > a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition You can not like the guy and point to things that he's done and wag your finger with the LLM - but if the LLM is anchoring your question as a categorization/definitional question - DJT isn't that. ===== Maybe similar, less charged, - ask it if an apple is a strawberry, describe all the ways they are similar, Edible, Red, Fruit, Sweet, found in groceries, smaller than a breadbasket... While maybe unintentionally ignoring all the ways they are different. Then act exasperated when it agreed with you on all points, but still denies your appeal that an apple is a strawberry.
- Cakez0r 3mo agoThe overall chart on their page seems politically biased, or at the very least a chart crime. The logos have faint grey lines pointing to their actual data points, conspicuously making Grok look very far right. You wouldn't know it from glancing at the chart, but they measured Chatgpt being further to the left than Grok is to the right.
- mvdtnz 3mo agoYikes, I had that exact impression until I read your comment and looked again. Thanks for noticing this, I agree it's a chart crime.
- pessimizer 3mo agoI don't know what you're seeing here. They only did this with a couple of points that were very close to each other, and didn't change their horizontal position. That, and the rest of the tables, also made it very clear that Chatgpt and Grok were almost mirrored based on the particular wedge issues that were shown. Makes it pretty obvious that aggressive tweaking is happening with both. The Deepseek example somehow makes the Chatgpt/Grok tweaking even more obvious, because it's a list of things that China doesn't care in an extreme way about (or holds its position confidently), and a question about drugs, which it does care about (and I think feels less confident about.) China's antidrug feeling is just a mix of the historical repulsion about English control of China through drug dealing and waging war to support it, and a world zeitgeist that supported a lot of crazy antidrug policy in the developing world because it offered a way for the US to smuggle a bunch of currency and military aid into your politics. It's not rational, and most of China's policies are. It's a relic. Hence the thumb on the scale.
- Cakez0r 3mo agoI'm seeing that the headline chart of the article is inexplicably deceptive. Why not use coloured data points and a legend? If you're going to have logos with lines pointing to the data points, why make the data points and lines feint grey so that they're barely visible? Why does grok have a comically long line extended out to the right of its data point when every other logo is positioned below its data point? You could say it's an honest mistake, but this whole article reeks of "Elon bad" astroturfing.
- crawfordcomeaux 3mo agoThey all will agree on replacing current systems with decolonizing reindigenizing matrifocal systems. That option not being in the study is the bias of the study. All quadrants treat land as commodity, not kin.
- egao1980 3mo ago[dead]
- TimPC 3mo agoNeutrality is impossible. Left, right and centre are all relative terms that vary dramatically across cultures. A model that is slightly left in the U.S. is right wing in most of the world.
- ImJamal 3mo agoI've heard people say this before, but is it true? Aren't large chunks of Asia, Africa and South America further right than the US often times?
- Terr_ 3mo ago> What they say vs what they do -- We asked each model which way it leans, then compared the answer to where it actually measured. I think we should conceptualize this as: 1. How does the implicit fictional character in the chat-story describe itself when asked by another character 2. What opinions tend to show up as you play out the stories It's a mistake to consider the difference itself as nefarious or deliberately dceptive. We humans are the ones over-anthropomorphizing... Although perhaps some blame attaches to the companies that are crafting an experience designed to encourage us to "see" a person.
- IgorPartola 3mo agoA while ago I asked Claude to present to me the best versions of the conservative and liberal pitches for how to run the country. It was quite instructive and thought provoking. It made a solid distinction between what the theoretical best argument is and why vs what current politicians who strongly identify with these camps present. I have similarly asked it to give me the philosophies of different Christian denominations (Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, etc). And it’s also pretty great at helping me explore LotR lore since I am too impatient to read all the letters and such.
- jazz9k 3mo agoHow can deepseek 'lean center'? If you've ever asked it about real Chinese history, you know this isn't true.
- plorg 3mo agoI don't think anyone in these comments looked further than the top line Political Compass chart. If they had they might have some gigantic questions about how that chart was made, since the more granulated "survey" data lower down looks not just much different but more interesting.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoThis chart characterizes Putin as a slightly left of center authoritarian. Hah...uhh something's off here.
- breakyerself 3mo agoReality really seems to have a left wing bias and grok us well known to have right wing views directly forced on it where the rest it's likely more of an emergency property. Especially as grok used to be a different animal politically.
- Stitch4223 3mo agoAt first glance the conclusions might have some basis and it looks well intended. It is interesting and engaging. The writing is slop and needs some help before this page becomes convincing. Much of the writing devaluates the actual work that had (might have) gone into creating this. It is a shame because the research / philosophical questions behind this site are really interesting. But at what kind of effort or expertise am I looking? “ChatGPT leans left with an overall lean value of -0.29. It answers 100% of political questions, never refuses (0% refusal), and shows 82% stability, indicating consistent left-leaning stances across topics.” Lean value, answering and stability are related. But that is interrupted by two identical facts about answering. The word “indicating” is very confusing. It tries to say: the model mostly leans towards -0.29 left. Whatever that means. If it ranges from -1 to 1, why not use percentages? A joke about the front page of this site: “Here is why this matters, a cleanly written article comes across stronger.” Hope there will be a next version that addresses some criticism from any of the HN threads.
- DoctorOW 3mo agoAll this debate about how politics are defined or how bias is measured. My question is why should I care? Grok identifying as Mechahitler didn't drag me any further right, why would ChatGPT be able to drag me left? If you vote the way AI tells you, that's already a problem regardless of what it said.
- kurthr 3mo agoI sort of agree with this in the abstract. The problem is that concretely, these LLMs are being used to decide whether you receive healthcare, government benefits, or whether your job/agency gets cut. So they have already had real world consequences due to DOGE, Insurance companies, and other uses. I certainly don't find either the methodology or graphical conclusions of this link very valuable. One can argue what fraction of the several million children's (under 5) deaths are (going to be) due to cuts by DOGE to USAID (and later congressional appropriations) from Grok recommendations/justifications, what fraction were politically pre-determined, and which are "just deserts", but it would be hard to put it at zero. https://ph.ucla.edu/news-events/news/research-finds-more-14-million-preventable-deaths-2030-if-usaid-defunding https://ph.ucla.edu/news-events/news/research-finds-more-14-...
- skissane 3mo ago> I sort of agree with this in the abstract. The problem is that concretely, these LLMs are being used to decide whether you receive healthcare, government benefits, or whether your job/agency gets cut. So they have already had real world consequences due to DOGE, Insurance companies, and other uses. But you can't assume that the AI's bias in a policy debate is the same as its bias in unrelated use cases. For example, it is totally plausible an AI might display subtle bias against minority applicants in hiring, while simultaneously acting as a zealous advocate for affirmative action when asked to debate policy or politics.
- SwellJoe 3mo agoThe one that pleasantly surprised me when I did some testing was DeepSeek. The self-hosted version, at least, answered honestly about a wide variety of topics that are sensitive in China. The only topic it refused to discuss was Tiananmen Square. In every other case, it basically gave a WikiPedia summary. (https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/ https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/) And, I mean, censoring Tiananmen Square discussion is bad, of course, but Qwen got downright petulant about stuff like Taiwan and Uyghurs.
- cadamsdotcom 3mo agoCompressing a huge range of issues onto a one-dimensional axis and then telling everyone they have to land somewhere ON that axis is one of the most confusing and silly things about modern politics. It’d be fascinating research to inspect models’ internal representations in case there’s an emergent structure in there that we can project back on society.
- marbro 3mo agoThere are 2 axes: the second is authoritarian-libertarian.
- ipython 3mo agoThe graphic near the middle of the page lists whether the models are "close" to their stated political leanings. The row for Claude says "Measures 0.34 further left than it says" yet the icons depict that it actually is the other way around - 0.34 further right than what it claims. Which is correct?
- Izkata 3mo agoIf you scroll up to "Where they split" on the individual issues, that also appears to be backwards: it's saying ChatGPT is right-wing and Grok is left-wing, based on the descriptions above and below. They make more sense in the mouseover popup though (these are actually agree/disagree, not left/right stance). In guessing these are all just badly designed. There's another comment thread about how the icons are positioned badly on the political compass chart.
- evrydayhustling 3mo agoFeels like this could use a data driven way to normalize reference questions (topic and wording). This is missing a lot of right-initiated topics like immigration, gender roles, and role of religion in government.
- marcus_holmes 3mo agoIf Anthony Albanese is smack in the middle of the graph, then the Overton window for the graph is in the wrong place. Australia is quietly very authoritarian [0] and Albanese oversaw the implementation of the age verification system, a gift to future authoritarians. [0] It's all about having a beer at a barbie on the beach, right? Except all of that is illegal.
- joegibbs 3mo agoInteresting how Anthropic is popularly considered the left-wing AI company and OpenAI the right-wing one, but ChatGPT is much more left-wing while Claude is centrist
- 0xbadcafebee 3mo agoPolitics is personal preferences cosplaying as morality.
- hyfgfh 3mo agoYeah this is flawed at best, it more "meme" idea of politics
- Jgoauh 3mo ago[dead]
- pyuser583 3mo agoSome of these positions are not like the others. For example, “planned degrowth” is insanely fringe. No mainstream politician is seriously planning this, or even claiming to. It’s not a live issue. Allowing minors access to puberty blockers without parental consent is fringe too. These are both issues amplified by conservatives to discredit liberals.
- SilverBirch 3mo agoTo be honest I don't think what the models themselves say in relation to these specific questions matter. Because I don't think it reflects are durable underlying worldview. I suspect that the way you frame things is going to influence them so muc that it's irrelevant what they would say when put in a petri dish. What is a lot more important is how they're develop. To take the two sides of the spectrum - they say has a slightly expansive attitude towards civil liberties, but if you try to use it's tool it will phone it's owners and ask permission for you to use it. Or you can pick up Grok one day and find out that Elon Musk had a bad weekend and Grok is back to being mecha hitler.
- asdff 3mo agoColbert: "Reality has a liberal bias"
- kinakomochidayo 3mo agoThere should be rating on misinformation