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Grok 4.5

x.ai

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Grok 4.5

#621

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

Somehow you have it 100% backwards. Grok is the only one that's not trained to be extremely biased. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

This. It's like people collectively forgot about the "misgendering worse than thermonuclear war, founding fathers were black" stuff.

Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.

Re: Grok 4.5

#622
post #609

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

What a crazy thing to say explicitly about the model that _avoids_ that kind of stuff. Did we already collectively forget about the ChatGPT "misgendering is worse than thermonuclear war" case, or Gemini picturing the Founding Fathers as black? Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.

You forget about Mecha-Hitler and Musk having the system prompts changed for him? Grok is dead-last on impartiality.

Re: Grok 4.5

#623
post #457

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?

What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?

Re: Grok 4.5

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get fable-ish performance with gpt 5.5 watching over opus output. Although it fundementally cannot work as well because gpt 5.5 doesn't see the thinking process behind opus 4.8 unlike fable which presumeably self-steers and is natively trained for it. See more: https://omp.sh - turn on advisor and set advisor role to gpt 5.5 xhigh thinking.

Advisor is such a killer hidden feature

Also burns through token budgets

Re: Grok 4.5

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Claim…

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.

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.

Re: Grok 4.5

#626

I like these AI threads with everyone's measurement of how good a model is starting with: "it feels like..." and that says a lot on how incapable we are to judge and compare these models.

Indeed. We use similar gauges to judge each other, with no better precision.

Re: Grok 4.5

#627
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?

What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?

No, but technically, all models go through an alignment phase where you feed data that's aligned to your goals and values to train the model so that it will exhibit the kind of behavior you want.

There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.

Re: Grok 4.5

#628
post #618

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it) Why give them money? It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

[deleted]

[dead]

Re: Grok 4.5

#629

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

People, even in tech, even in AI, are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours. Cancellation doesn't work anymore: you can't get away with presenting your side as normal and other side as deviant and let ostracism win your idea's battles without your idea having to fight for itself. The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea…

Free speech is important, but the truth is pretty important, too. I'm fine with calling liars out.

The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.

The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.

Re: Grok 4.5

#630
post #526
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet). The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change. There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THin…

> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias. The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards…

I think the issue here is that there's no objective difference between "alignment" and "actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative", beside the fact that the latter refers to the kind of political narratives that you don't like.
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