Comment by kelipso
2 days ago
If it’s not trained to be biased towards Elon Musk is always right or whatever, I think it will be much less of a problem than humans.
Humans are VERY political creatures. A hint that their side thinks X is true and humans will reorganize their entire philosophy and worldview retroactively to rationalize X.
LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments. So you architecturally predisposed argument, I don’t think is true.
> LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments.
It seems essentially wrong to anthropomorphize LLMs as having instincts or not. What they have is training, and there's currently no widely accepted test for determining whether a "fair" evaluation from an LLM stems from biases during training.
(It should be clear that humans don't need to be unpolitical; what they need to be is accountable. Wikipedia appears to be at least passably competent at making its human editors accountable to each other.)
I said LLM doesn’t have such instinct but yeah I agree there should be less anthropomorphizing and more evaluation based framing when talking about LLMs, but it’s not that easy in regular discussions.
About Wikipedia, there is obvious bias and cliques there as has been discussed in this thread and HN for many years, not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.
> not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.
claimed bias != bias
It may have bias, or it may not, but the only reason Grokipedia exists is because Musk doesn't like the contents of Wikipedia.
> bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.
You are correct, but only in the sense that Musk was unable to impose his own biases upon Wikipedia, so he had to make one where he can tune bias to whatever is convenient at the moment.
> not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.
No, the reason is Musk didn't like that the Wikipedia article on him added the factual record of him doing a Nazi salute [0]
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/united-states/article/2025/01/23/m...
Why do you think that an LLM wouldn't have biases?
There was a whole collection of posts where Grok says stuff like "Elon Musk is more athletic than LeBron James".
Well yeah, probably because it was instructed to praise Musk. Doesn’t imply that there can exist no LLM that doesn’t do that…
Why would we assume an LLM, even one that doesn't appear to have a bias like that built in, doesn't have one? Just because we can't identify it immediately, does not mean it doesn't exist.
Groups of people can and do have bias, but I also think it's much harder to control the outcome (for better or worse) when inputs are more diverse.
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