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"Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy
by Gareth321 3mo ago
"Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy soapboxing. It's perfectly reasonable for people who enjoy this technology to ask you to keep it in spaces which are dedicated to soapboxing, like Reddit. Not HackerNews.
- atwrk 3mo agoThe owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?
- gadders 3mo ago[flagged]
- mschuster91 3mo ago> i.e. anyone not the far left is an extremist He literally involved himself with Tommy Robinson and Reform UK [1], as well as supported German AfD [2]. It doesn't get more far-right than that - the AfD is so far-right that even other European far-right parties such as France's RN distance themselves. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70ep8lp4jjo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70ep8lp4jjo [2] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/musk-afd-wahlkampfshow-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/mus...
- gadders 3mo agoDude, no they're not. Tommy Robinson is a grifter, but Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly.
- mschuster91 3mo ago> Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election This does not change the fact that Reform is a far-right party (and, like almost all far-right parties in the Western nations, one that has been linked to Russian corruption [1]). > People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly. Lol as if far-right politics are any better. Milei is running Argentinia into the ground, so is Bukele with El Salvador, and so is Trump in the US. The only ones who are somewhat of an exception is Italy with Meloni, who managed to dance on the very thin line separating far-right ideology from inevitable disaster. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo
- gadders 3mo ago"Far Right" in the sense of "The Guardian says so". And one bloke getting arrested doesn't prove the whole party is Russia-funded, despite that being the catch-all left wing excuse every time they lose an election. People in El Salvador generally seem pretty happy with a 98% reduction in the murder rate. For Argentina, it's too early to tell. We'll have to wait until the shock therapy has finished.
- krige 3mo agoAt least they made the trains run on time! /s
- strangecasts 3mo agoThis is moving the goalposts from "Elon supports far-right politicians" which was cited with sources, you're just going "well he's right to"
- gadders 3mo agoNo, I'm saying they're not far right. It's a pejorative term made up by the left to try and shift the overton window away from conservatism. They're about as "far right" as the 80's Thatcher government.
- lta 3mo agoI'm genuinely flabbergasted to read this here. There's no possible comparison between Musk and Mamdani's gestures, at least from the perspective of someone who grew up in a region occupied by the Nazis during the war and had him grand parents deported. Regarding EU politician support, it's really not what you describe. The politicians he's been supporting are the ones in the rightmost spectrum of the political chessboard in each case I've witnessed. There isn't a car I've witnessed where he supported someone center right, or left. These false equivalences are dangerous.
- gadders 3mo agoThe comparison between the gestures is that neither are intended to be a literal Nazi salute and anyone who genuinely thinks either of them was has an IQ issue. And obviously he's supporting right wing causes, because they are the ones he agrees with. Reid Hoffman only supports left wing causes.
- wyre 3mo agoAbsolutely inane take. It doesn’t matter if Elon intended the nazi salute he did twice to actually be a nazi salute, he still did it.
- gadders 3mo agoSo even if you don't support nazis, just putting your arm at that angle magically turns you in to one? Is this like a spell from Harry Potter or something? Can anyone accidentally do a nazi salute?
- cdelsolar 3mo agoyou think he just "put his arm at that angle" accidentally? like it was a spell?
- gadders 3mo agoThe OP seems to think that putting your arm at that angle turns you into a nazi. I think he's been watching Father Ted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLNMSTQnSyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLNMSTQnSyk
- vardump 3mo ago> actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on. In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.
- gf000 3mo agoHow can an LLM be apolitical if they had to choose a set of text to feed it, which choice is inherently political? Especially when the whole thing of grok is to have a certain very specific bias?
- Gareth321 3mo agoLet's be empirical about this. [Grok is the least biased of the frontier LLMs.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/06/24/are-ai-chatbots-like-chatgpt-politically-biased-we-tested-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...) I agree with you directionally: the choice of how the weights are shaped can be politically motivated. This is why I prefer models where the lab has chosen to preference fact over opinion or certain political values. To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok.
- cauch 3mo agoWell, in a world where "the 2020 elections were stolen" or "climate change is a hoax" are right-leaning positions, being "balanced" does not mean being neutral. As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning. As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre).
- Gareth321 3mo agoThere are empirical answers to climate change and election tampering. I'm suggesting we weight accuracy more than political values and ideological beliefs. [DeepSeek was created by distilling OpenAI and Anthropic's models.](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) Their weights reflect that. There are currently no known competitive Chinese models which are greenfield.
- bonoboTP 3mo agoIt's pointless to try to separate things as political or non-political. You always have politics when you have deep disagreement, especially on values, among people who interact. Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it. There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- claytongulick 3mo agoThat's like saying "there's no way to remove emotion from a conversation". Of course not, emotion is always present. But adults practice emotional regulation and work hard to prevent it from interfering with relationships (i.e. not screaming when you're angry). Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try? In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones. We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".
- bonoboTP 3mo agoYou can try, but it only works when you have shared values. When deep values are contested it's harder to put differences aside. For example, I don't want to bring up hot button issues, but some years ago there was a wave of politics entering pull requests and mailing lists where software is developed. Many just wanted to keep the politics out. They didn't realize there is no way of playing politics by not playing. So they got outplayed by those who know what politics is. There's a threshold for everybody. By saying that you can neatly box it away, you implicitly admit that the thing is not very important or concerning to you. But instead of daring to say that outloud you just say let's not do politics. Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.
- Alpha3031 3mo agoI feel like when they decided the model was "too woke" so it would be a good idea to make it "MechaHitler" was when the not making it political ship sailed.