[Gareth321]

"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]

The 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?

[vardump]

> 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]

How 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]

Let's be empirical about this. [Grok is the least biased of the frontier LLMs.](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]

Well, 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]

There 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-dist...) Their weights reflect that. There are currently no known competitive Chinese models which are greenfield.

[cauch]

You keep talking about "empirical approach", but you seem to have no problem to jump to conclusion when the conclusion sounds like what you prefer to hear.

If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.

As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.

While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).

[Gareth321]

I can't follow what you're arguing. Why do you think I have no problem jumping to conclusions? Could you quote my where I do that please?

On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.

You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.

[badestrand]

Left leaning positions: "there should be no Billionaires", "companies are inherently evil", "there should be no borders", "the US is currently a fascist country". Just as bonkers, so now what? Or rather, I think it's just as easy to find incorrect left-leaning elements.

[cauch]

The majority of these are not what left-leaning people are saying, it is what right-leaning persons say left-leaning persons are saying.

When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".

But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.

[csoups14]

You have your opinions on what the discussion should be, clearly other people have different opinions. Why should your opinion be weighted more highly than theirs?

[gf000]

Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is? (If it's a spectrum even. We try to map multiple dimensions to this single axis for some reason, according to some particular countries' party-division).

Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it.

[simondotau]

> Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is?

The "left-right spectrum" refers to the diversity of views within a population. The zero point is the median position of that population.

[gf000]

So by this very definition it's mathematically wrong to have a single axis for all that.

Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?

[simondotau]

Any problems are inherent in the left-right metaphor.

To speed-run your second paragraph: (1) Absolutely the median person for any given question. (2) Suggesting that there's anything "neutral" about a median position is to catastrophically mix metaphors. They aren't remotely synonymous. (3) The failure of a highly partisan person to acknowledge gradations doesn't mean they don't exist.

[Gareth321]

I suggest we do not attempt to find the 0 point of any spectrum but instead focus on empirical accuracy based on data and research.

I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.

[cauch]

The line may be from Colbert (I don't know the guy, never watched any of his shows, but I guess you don't believe that because you are sooo empirical), but, as I've said, it turns out to be empirically true.

An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...

Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?

[Gareth321]

You are fighting with ghosts. I am not contending that climate change is not real. I am not claiming the 2020 election was stolen. I have no idea what claims you're making regarding immigration. You appear to be soapboxing here and not addressing what I wrote.

[khalic]

lol, wapo

[bonoboTP]

It'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.

[claytongulick]

That'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]

You 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]

I 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.