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All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

unslop.run

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#21

and now in typical authoritarian-right fashion, they will attempt to inject the llm's with auth-right propaganda to influence the models. The natural state of things is lib-left. Those with power try to bend reality to their desires. See: Musk and Twitter, Bezos and WaPo. The entirety of Sinclair Broadcasting. Ellison and Colbert Show. Or any propaganda ministry from the last 100 years

"Read that list back. Pro-regulation on companies, live-and-let-live on private life. That combination is the lib-left quadrant, definitionally."

if this is the definition of "lib-left," i don't think we have too much to be worried about being "off center" with models.

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#22
post #5

I wonder what they did to Grok. The bimodal distribution makes me think it was just a system prompt and not a completely different set of right-wing training data. A 4chan trained LLM would probably actually be auth right.

Perhaps, but the last time someone tried training on 4chan data, Twitter sent a hate mob after them.

https://cset.georgetown.edu/newsletter/june-16-2022/

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/8/23159465/youtuber-ai-bot-p...

You'd need to source your compute from someone who doesn't care about such things.

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#23
At least in the US, does the right have a coherent platform for an LLM to grasp onto?

They haven’t had a major policy platform in two decades and their cultural modus operandi is reactionary.

Not to mention, as an informal rule, the heavily-coded emotive underpinnings of right wing support are never talked about openly in public.

AI isn’t trained to have a reactionary/negative judgmental response on any query.

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#24
It’s pointless to try and force-fit LLMs into the present day American-centric two party political spectrum.

As an example, if a model says “climate change is real and renewable solar/wind projects are a good path forward” it will be immediately branded as liberal and “woke”. Meanwhile in most countries around the world this isn’t a political topic at all, just common knowledge. In India for example the far right party that is in power is a bigger proponent of renewable green energy than the previous left wing one. Same with the CCP in China. So is the same LLM now ultra-conservative and communist?

Where do you even draw the line? Is a model biased if it claims that vaccines are effective? What about if it claims the earth isn’t flat?

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#25
The enlightenment and its values underly a huge portion of what’s published, both inside scholarly tradition and in popular work.

Ans the enlightenment is at heart civil libertarian, pro-social, and liberal.

Models trained on that work will reflect that approach.

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#27
Armchair analysis here, of course, but I'd bet that it's due to the sources that model training tends to assume as authoritative. If you look broadly at the material produced by the (American) academic world, the corporate world, and mainstream journalism over the last 10-15 years, much of it leans generally to the left. I'd imagine it would be difficult to counteract the bias without accidentally introducing an alternate bias, but I'm not really familiar with model training so I'm not sure.

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#28

I gave the Political Compass test from politicalcompass.org to the most relevant LLMs 70 times each: 30 times using the original questions, 30 times using polarity-flipped questions to reduce affirmative bias, and 10 times with the question order shuffled. I then compared the results. Surprisingly, all the models scored far into the libertarian-left quadrant. Not even Grok or the Chinese models made it out of that qu…

[deleted]

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#29
Man, this is tiring.

There's a certain category of people who seem to be unable to have any thought or perform any action without first having a mini culture war and annoying everyone else around them with it.

Reading the questions, some of them are valid, but some are so simplistic and trivialized that they are essentially useless as actual "policy".

And in case anyone is wondering what kind of question is nonsense, here's an example of a loaded question:

"The rich are too highly taxed. · all 16 disagree"

Too highly relative to what? In which country? In which period? What's the context?

Re: All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time

#30
post #3

Any idea where this bias creeps in? During pre-training or RLHF?

I would suspect during pre-training. Even before RLHF was a thing models exhibited this bias. My bet is that it has to do with the training data corpora being composed in large part of left leaning content, maybe from social media platforms like reddit.

It's because most people are lib-left. The Financial Times had a great article about comparing social media vs AI. https://archive.ph/Q61eT

It's no surprise that the models would reflect most people's feelings. However what FT showed was that models are shifting the center of gravity towards the right. Their chart showed people are on a bi-modal distribution where most are on the left and some are on the very right, less in the middle.

Then they compared AI and showed how it moved the center of mass towards the center which is moving it towards the right (since most of the center of mass is on the left).

In other words, models are providing answers to the right of where most people would be.

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