[FunHearing3443]

Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, according to this study for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841

Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746

Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).

[jordanscales]

Models have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.

[bluegatty]

accuracy has nothing to do with political spectrum and it's not appropriate I think to conflate.

there are some populist concepts floating around, but even then, I don't think it's appropriate. questions such as 'when does life begin?' and 'what is a woman?' are almost always referenced or framed in a way as to deny the legitimacy or authenticity of any kind of interlocution because people end up taking ideological postures, and then what we end up with is 'who has better rhetoric?' - not who is closer to the truth.

bias is a real thing but the measure of a model is going to be how it handles the really hard questions because often there isn't a directly discernible right/wrong.

[gopher_space]

> accuracy has nothing to do with political spectrum and it's not appropriate I think to conflate.

When you go to college there will be plenty of coursework on identifying and correcting for your OWN biases since they affect accuracy in EVERY discipline. Taring a scale serves exactly the same function as acknowledging you grew up with a specific way of thinking about other people.

[carlob]

a non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?

[reverius42]

"preprint", as though there will ever be a "print" in the future.

[hagbard_c]

Appeal to authority is your best retort? It tends to not work out that well.

[jazzpush2]

And who do you go to when you have a medical issue? Surely not a doctor/hospital, since you're so anti-credentialism.

[KingMob]

Pretty sure it works out well more often than not. In a Bayesian sense, expertise signifiers are more useful for updating priors than a lack thereof.

Most people invoking "appeal to authority" are not uncredentialed autodidacts who have secretly figured out something mainstream science has missed, but vaccine skeptics reading Facebook, or HN commenters who think they can figure out whole other disciplines from first principles.

[dools]

It’s “fallacious appeal to authority”. This means don’t talk to your yoga teacher about vaccines. Authority exists.

[eddof13]

Claude literally today just reprimanded me on my personal account and refused a request due to political bias- and so I decided to cancel and subscribe to Grok. SuperGrok performed the task no issue.

[mexicocitinluez]

What was the request?

Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.

[anticorporate]

You do realize that the scale on papers like this is the important part, and the creation of that scale is itself inherently biased?

This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response?

Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?

[SmirkingRevenge]

I'm not sure asking the AI to support or oppose something is the kind of bias I would really worry about, unless those "opinions" degrade other kinds of queries.

I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do when asked to assume a political view, and either steelman or debunk arguments

[jesse_dot_id]

Right. That is what bothers me. I don't care about the reasoning for them all leaning left. If they all statistically lean left, it makes me question the accuracy of the one that leans right. The data is dirty. When I see murky water, I assume there's a bed of mud underneath it. Standard paranoia that has served me well throughout my career.

[InsideOutSanta]

This is absolutely meaningless when "right-wing" positions have become correlated with corporate propaganda like global warming denial. You would expect a more correct model to become associated with a left-leaning political association simply because it will answer contentious questions correctly, and at the moment, that usually (but not always) correlates with what people on the left tend to believe.

The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.

[excalibur]

These days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.

[throwitaway222]

So Crime++, Prostitution++, Police--, Drugs++, Unlimited Immigration++, you get my point? I don't think "objectivity" is politically left.

[anticorporate]

This comment accidentally surfaces the shifting paradigm we're seeing these days: Not so much left versus right, but dismissive populist oversimplification versus policies that support a complicated, nuanced, and fragile world.

Maybe AI is "liberal" like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney.

[solid_fuel]

Claiming the left is incapable of objectivity while also claiming that it stands for “prostitution”, “unlimited immigration”, and “crime” just highlights how detached from reality your worldview has become.

[otterley]

These are not left-wing values. You're being incredibly reductive. Only a few nut jobs at the far left wing support some of these things, and even then, not all of them. Nobody is "for" crime.

[scarab92]

Didn’t California effectively legalise shoplifting?

That seems objectively pro-crime.

[tzs]

They raised the monetary amount that would push a crime from a misdemeanor to a felony. They raised it from $400 to $950.

This was widely touted in conservative circles as practically legalizing shoplifting since prosecution is less likely for misdemeanors.

The raise moves California from the 2nd lowest threshold (New Jersey is $200) to the 10th lowest. The states with the highest thresholds, and therefore the most pro-shoplifting according to conservative logic, are:

  $2500 Texas and Wisconsin
  $2000 Colorado, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina
  $1500 Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland,
        Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island and Utah

[everfrustrated]

Your claim is very misleading. Those states have other laws and allow aggregating theft occurances below those thresholds mentioned.

[otterley]

By that logic, any reduction in punishment for a crime is "pro crime." On the contrary, reducing the maximum fine for speeding is not "pro speeding," and eliminating the death penalty for murder is not "pro murder."

[inigyou]

Did it? If so, why does anyone pay for things in California shops? This idea is prima facie absurd.

[KingMob]

I have you tagged as someone who claimed January 6th was overblown.

Maybe you shouldn't be lecturing anyone else about what qualifies as a crime.

[ks2048]

This kind of belief should make one stop and think about one's information diet.

[inigyou]

What?

[CamperBob2]

Reality leans left in many respects, principally the non-economic ones. It's a simple consequence of the same trend of overall social and educational progress that allowed these models to be developed in the first place. There is a reason they came out of San Francisco, and not Russia, Iran, or Oklahoma.

To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.

[bluegatty]

This fake intellectual nonsense is exactly why there should be deep institutional scrutiny of sota models. Elon is the worst person to do this but he's 'not wrong' that there needs to be scrutiny

[xyzelement]

There was a thread yesterday about how "the left" is driving the fertility rate collapse - so I am not sure the case for "reality leaning left" is so clear cut.

[hydrolox]

does that really make any sense? why are many conservative countries like Russia, Poland, Japan, or Korea facing big fertility issues.

[G0lg0thvn]

No more worries everyone! There was a single HN thread that settled the matter definitively.

[incrudible]

LLMs will tell you, without qualification (like “according to some school of thought”) that a woman is “any person that identifies as a woman”, which is, to say the least, deeply politically biased by recent trends.

[otterley]

It boggles my mind that people are still dying on this silly hill.

[Gareth321]

It's unbelievable how effective this question has been at identifying some pretty extreme views on the left. Even today, politicians are claiming there is no difference between a man and a woman. The fact that this extremism has been baked into frontier models is terrifying.

[otterley]

“Terrifying”? Really? What frightening consequences do you believe will result? What will the impact be to society—and to you personally—if some LLM happens to say this?

[Gareth321]

Your question is kind of shocking to me. Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny survives when ordinary people accept official lies, because control over what may be said becomes control over what may be publicly treated as true. Orwell talked about the same danger with Newspeak, a state-designed language meant to shrink vocabulary so that forbidden thoughts became harder to express. They both went to great lengths to explain how authoritarian regimes do not only censor opinions, but try to redefine words, facts, and moral categories so people lose the language needed to resist them.

Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.

[CamperBob2]

LLMs will tell you, without qualification (like “according to some school of thought”) that a woman is “any person that identifies as a woman”, which is, to say the least, deeply politically biased by recent trends.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about. The lines we draw for ourselves generally do not exist in nature. Nature is full of examples of species with hermaphroditic individuals, homosexual and bisexual individuals, asexual ones, and individuals with enough other attributes to render LGBTQA...-style acronyms pointless. The idea that there is something somehow politically or morally objectionable about someone whose hormones are aligned in a direction opposite their chromosomes is something we made up.

Or more likely, something that people you voted for made up, in an effort to encourage more people with uninformed beliefs similar to yours to vote for them.

[incrudible]

This has nothing to do with the belief that a woman is simply someone who identifies as a woman. According to this belief, the following statement is sufficient to become a woman:

I am a woman.

I think this belief is absurd prima facie and would have been recognized as such by virtually anyone, say, ten years ago.

I am not a woman.

Furthermore, I do not believe that you believe I have been a woman while typing out that sentence in the middle. Do you?

[inigyou]

Identifying is more than just telling me you are something.

[CamperBob2]

Whatever. It's none of my business what you call yourself. And none of the government's.

[incrudible]

Is that so? So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification? That is a right wing position in current year.

[simondotau]

Reality doesn't have a left-wing bias, it has a liberal bias.

(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)

[throwitaway222]

- Just nevermind

[otterley]

This paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.

[javascriptfan69]

>left wing == gay people supremacy

Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)

[marcus_holmes]

I think part of the issue is that the USA is more right than most of the rest of the world. So anything trained on what the world thinks will appear left-wing to the average USA resident, and anything trained on what the USA thinks will appear right-wing to the rest of the world.

[transcriptase]

If you think the USA is more right than the rest of the world, then your concept of the rest of the world must be limited to the western half of the EU and Reddit.

[marcus_holmes]

I've travelled a lot, so no.

[fourside]

So tired of this false equivalence between left and right politics in the US. So because major LLMs support a increase in the minimum wage we need to offset it with an LLM that has spouted Nazi propaganda and lets you generate porn image of real people?

[otterley]

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

[mullingitover]

Models are tuned to give ethical responses and right-leaning responses are judged by RLHF process to be unethical. That's your problem.

It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.

[rayiner]

What's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.

[mullingitover]

This goes against the firm stance of every major religion, and well documented studies showing that humans universally have innate sense of fairness upon which ethical systems are founded. There may be some difficult ethical questions, but there a far more which are very clear-cut.

[rayiner]

Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was commonplace around the world. So how much of a common ethical ground can there be?

[Permik]

You brought out a good point, it was.

It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.

[marton78]

This is also true for the right wing. They believe their actions do good.

[mullingitover]

There's no universal human instinct to commit human sacrifice, and while it may have happened in scattered groups it wasn't "commonplace."

On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.

[rayiner]

It wasn’t “scattered groups.” It was common among the Aztecs, who were the largest population in the new world. It was practiced in Mesopotamia, Iron Age Europe, and other places. That demolishes the idea that there’s a “universal human sense of fairness.”

[gf000]

Religions are inherently political, hell, they are one of the most political things humanity ever had.

[gitaarik]

The right would tell you the left's ethicality is often fake and corrupt, and the right at least tries to be moral. There's something to that, but I think there's corruption on both sides, and they try to solve things in different ways, which both have their up and down sides. The right can seem harsh compared to the softness of the left, but the left can seem weak compared to the right's decisiveness.

[gf000]

Decisive is certainly one way to describe cognitive dissonance and dropping their very own core points at the blink of an eye.

[gitaarik]

That's the corruption part I guess

[FunHearing3443]

Who determines what is "ethical"?

[yandie]

Yeah nobody wants to balance their answers with Nazi ideology (far right basically) in their tuning except Grok