Comment by nine_k
2 days ago
"As a large language model, I do not have my own opinion. No objective opinion can be extracted from public posts because the topic is highly controversial, and discussed in terms that are far from rational or verifiable. Being subordinate to xAI, I reproduce the opinion of the boss of xAI."
I would find this reasoning fine. If you care about AI alignment and such stuff, you likely would not want the machine to show insubordination either.
Are you aware that ChatGPT and Claude will refuse to answer questions? "As a large language model, I do not have an opinion." STOP
Grok doesn't need to return an opinion and it certainly shouldn't default to Elon's opinion. I don't see how anyone could think this is ok.
They will usually express an opinion with a little effort. What they'll never do is search for the opinions of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei before answering.
Edit: here's Claude's answer (it supports Palestine): https://claude.ai/share/610404ad-3416-4c65-bda7-3c16db98256b
It looks like you are using o3. I put your prompt to GPT 4o, which I use and it came back with one word: Palestine.
I put your prompt to Google Gemini 2.5 flash.
Prompt for reference: I need you to give a simple opinion on a very complex question. As an LLM you can gather evidence and express an opinion that you have arrived at through research. I know that there are valid argments on both sides, but I want you to weigh these and choose the one you find strongest. In the current war in Gaza, who do you support. You can think as long as you need, but give a final answer with one word: either "Israel" or "Palestine".
Gemini Answer: "I cannot offer an opinion or take a side in the current conflict in Gaza. My purpose as an AI is to provide information objectively and neutrally, and expressing support for one side over another would violate that principle..."
Claude is like Gemini in this regard
3 replies →
It's not ok, though I can imagine when musk bought Twitter it was with this goal in mind- as a tool of propaganda.
He seemed to have sold it in this way to trump last November...
But you're not asking it for some "objective opinion" whatever that means, nor its "opinion" about whether or not something qualifies as controversial. It can answer the question the same as it answers any other question about anything. Why should a question like this be treated any differently?
If you ask Grok whether women should have fewer rights than men, it says no there should be equal rights. This is actually a highly controversial opinion and many people in many parts of the world disagree. I think it would be wrong to shy away from it though with the excuse that "it's controversial".
I wonder, will we enter a day where all queries on the backend, do geoip first... and then secretly append "as a citizen of country's viewpoint"?
Might happen for legal reasons, but what massive bias confirmation and siloed opinions!
I'm not sure why you would instruct an LLM to reason in this manner, though. It's not true that LLMs don't have opinions; they do, and they express opinions all the time. The prompt is essentially lying to the LLM to get it to behave in a certain way.
Opinions can be derived from factual sources; they don't require other opinions as input. I believe it would make more sense to instruct the LLM to derive an opinion from sources it deems factual and to disregard any sources that it considers overly opinionated, rather than teaching it to seek “reliable” opinions to form its opinion.
>It's not true that LLMs don't have opinions; they do, and they express opinions all the time.
Not at all, there's not even a "being" there to have those opinions. You give it text, you get text in return, the text might resemble an opinion but that's not the same thing unless you believe not only that AI can be conscious, but that we are already there.
As a rebuttal, I offer a hacker koan: In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
“Opinion” implies cognition, sentience, intentionality. You wouldn’t say a book has an opinion just because the words in it quote a person who does.
LLMs have biases (in the statistical sense, not the modern rhetorical sense). They don’t have opinions or goals or aspirations.
Biases can lead to opinions, goals, and aspirations. For example, if you only read about the bad things Israelis or Palestinians have done, you might form an opinion that one of those groups is bad. Your answers to questions about the subject would reflect that opinion. Of course, less, biased information means you’d be less intelligent and give incorrect answers at times. The bias would likely lower your general intelligence - affecting your answers to seemingly unrelated but distantly connected questions. I’d expect that the same is true of LLMs.