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by not_wyoming 50 days ago
I actually did this - I plugged The Verge article into Claude and got the following critique of what biases are there:

> The article accurately cites real Gallup data but selectively omits findings that complicate its "backlash" narrative — most notably that curiosity is Gen Z's single most common emotion toward AI, and that daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest. The 79% "laziness" concern and declining hope figures are presented as evidence of generational rejection, when the researchers themselves describe what they found as "deep ambivalence." *In short, the article uses real numbers to tell a cleaner, more oppositional story than the underlying polling actually supports.*

Then I then put that Claude critique back into Claude and asked it to analyze the critique for bias and agendas and got this:

> The critique accurately catches real flaws in The Verge article — particularly the omission of "curiosity" as Gen Z's top emotion and the failure to distinguish between heavy users (who are more positive) and non-users (who drive most of the negativity). However, *the critique has its own directional bias, consistently framing every correction in ways that soften the negative trend, while ignoring data that cuts the other way — like the sharp positivity decline even among daily users, and the near-majority of Gen Z workers who see AI as a net negative in the workplace. *Both pieces are selectively using the same real data to tell opposite stories; the Gallup findings themselves are more nuanced and more negative than the critique allows.*

So according to Claude, Claude is biased in how it describes The Verge as biased.

LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.

3 comments

So basically sycophantic LLM behavior. Nothing new then
> LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.

THIS. ALL. DAY.

I'm honestly very impressed. You read these passages multiple times across composing two HN replies and did not, at any point, realize that curiosity is not an inherently positive emotion.

Curiosity is a "desire to know." We badly want to know about things that threaten us. People in 2020 were extremely curious about COVID-19, but that doesn't mean they liked it.

You might say, "well it's open for interpretation. It could be positive curiosity." But why stop there? Interpret: Anxiety is more common than anger, and anger is more common than excitement. Given a sample member who is anxious, angry, not excited, and not hopeful, do you think their curiosity is positively or negatively inflected?

Additionally, I don't know where Claude got the idea that "daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest." That's not in the data set, and a different data set will need to be interpreted separately.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but you've completely failed to engage critically with either the article or with Claude. Claude misread the article and then affirmed its own misreading, and you took that all at face value.