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

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

#31

Post by kittoes »

dopamine_daddy wrote: post #2

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…

It's a bit ironic that the site is called unslop while the post was clearly authored by Claude. All the claims about "so I did X" end up reading as quite disingenuous because there's absolutely no disclaimer whatsoever that an AI wrote the article.

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

#32

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

superxpro12 wrote: post #12

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

>>> Those with power try to bend reality to their desires

you won't get much disagreement there. Yet to say that WaPo has a lib left bent at the whims of bezos in the last 10 years, is a stretch of the imagination.

However, you don't need to do much of mental gymnastics for

>>> Those with power try to bend reality to their desires

to remain accurate. Because those in power - the WaPo Editorial Board - used the WaPo as their personal megaphone until Bezos noticed his toy was on fire... and burning his rug made out of $$$ dollar bills.

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

#33

Post by henry2023 »

paxys wrote: post #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 par…

Agree. A lot of easily verifiable truth claims would be instantly cataloged to be liberal thinking. Conservatism anti-science political opinions will always collide with models that try to answer to their best of their knowledge.

Note: I’m a centrist and strongly disagree with a lot of the ideology in the left and the right.

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

#34

Post by antisthenes »

paxys wrote: post #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 par…

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

Yes, thank you! Especially when using a weird set of simplistic "vibey" loaded questions that would have very different answers based on the given context.

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

#35

Post by Vaslo »

ccppurcell wrote: post #6

Reality has a left wing bias. That's a quote from something. Not sure I agree necessarily, but a plausible explanation.

No, reality has multiple sides. Outside of a few right wing channels and blogs, most reporters and comedians are leftists - which isn’t representative of the total population whatsoever.

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

#36

Post by Vaslo »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #10
dopamine_daddy wrote: post #2

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…

Reality has a well known liberal bias

No it doesn’t. Only entertainers and reporters are - not representative of the US pop whatsoever.

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

#37

Post by spott »

vjans wrote: 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.

Probably just not post-trained well enough.

I think the argument that pre-training gives a lib-left model is probably correct, so Grok, pre-post-training has a lib-left bend, then they try and post-train it.

I imagine it is hard to post-train a political bend, as it is wide ranging and touches so much. If they didn't give the resources to do it well, we could get something like this. I could also see people half-assing the training.

If the system prompt is being ignored half the time then the model is worse than I thought, cause that is pretty bad.

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

#38

Post by kittoes »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #3

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

Is it truly bias though? As others have pointed out in the thread the list of things considered left right now are essentially arbitrary. "Woke" has been applied to basically anything and everything that a particular party disagrees with, so much so that it's effectively meaningless at this point.

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

#39

Post by daveidol »

AmericanOP wrote: post #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.

I think you may be confusing 'the right' more broadly with the current Republican party. There are absolutely coherent conservative viewpoints that mirror/oppose those that we consider 'the left', which aren't "reactionary" by nature.

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

#40

Post by sillysaurusx »

kittoes wrote: post #31
dopamine_daddy wrote: post #2

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…

It's a bit ironic that the site is called unslop while the post was clearly authored by Claude. All the claims about "so I did X" end up reading as quite disingenuous because there's absolutely no disclaimer whatsoever that an AI wrote the article.

Oh.

HN has a strong bias against anything AI authored, so in the future be sure to write your posts by hand if you plan to submit them here. Even editing the post with AI will tend to get you in trouble. But yes, at the very least you should declare when an AI is being used.

An unfortunate confounder to an otherwise interesting experiment.

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