Comment by FunHearing3443
4 hours ago
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).
Models have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.
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.
> 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.
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.
What was the request?
Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
nice try fbi
a non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?
"preprint", as though there will ever be a "print" in the future.
Appeal to authority is your best retort? It tends to not work out that well.
And who do you go to when you have a medical issue? Surely not a doctor/hospital, since you're so anti-credentialism.
It’s “fallacious appeal to authority”. This means don’t talk to your yoga teacher about vaccines. Authority exists.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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.
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
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.
does that really make any sense? why are many conservative countries like Russia, Poland, Japan, or Korea facing big fertility issues.
No more worries everyone! There was a single HN thread that settled the matter definitively.
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.
It boggles my mind that people are still dying on this silly hill.
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.
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- Just nevermind
This paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.
>left wing == gay people supremacy
Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
facts have a left leaning bias
Correction: facts are facts.
How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.
Haven’t heard this one in a while XD
This is an incredibly dangerous and insane world view.
Are you really that ignorant to not understand that a form of this is at the heart of basically every atrocity in history?
I think we should ask the right why the facts keep aligning with the left more often. It is a real observed phenomenon, but what causes it?
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Unless you ask them about IQ, which is apparently not real?
Cue the IQ denier deniers
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Are those infamous lefty iq deniers with us in the room right now? Gosh this must be keeping you up at night
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?
You are assuming that both left and right encompass differing biases of a similar nature but the right has made detachment from reality a symbol of in-group loyalty and anti-intellectualism the norm within its political camp.
If you fed the LLM only research papers with zero emotional or contextual data just acknowledging reality would be sufficient to lean left.
I can’t believe this got downvoted. HN is so fucking red pilled. I blame crypto.
These days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.
So Crime++, Prostitution++, Police--, Drugs++, Unlimited Immigration++, you get my point? I don't think "objectivity" is politically left.
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.
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.
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What?
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.
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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.
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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.
What's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.
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.
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Who determines what is "ethical"?
Yeah nobody wants to balance their answers with Nazi ideology (far right basically) in their tuning except Grok