Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Why 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.

  by godshatter
• Of 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.
  by uyzstvqs
• Political 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
  by dwoosley
• Real 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
  by samat
• The 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.
  by Cakez0r
• The 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).
  by throw4847285
• The 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.
  by mrhottakes
• The 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.
  by giancarlostoro