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

unslop.run

51–60 of 84 posts

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

#51

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 alte…

Yeah, and who picks the sources?

Most of the data on the internet is UGC, and most of the time it's VERY right-leaning. It was one of the reasons OpenAI was "afraid" to release GPT-2: because it produced results that people in Silicon Valley didn't like.

I remember when Microsoft released the first proto-LLM and users always steered to being a nazi.

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

#52
post #3

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

The bias creeps in when they pick what sources go into the dataset. The second biggest factor is RLHF because that's the point of it. All LLM providers aim to make models "safe" and safety in our modern discourse means not expressing ideas that contradict the "left ideology".

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

#53
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it possible that facts and reality lean left? It's not a mathematical equation, there is no requirement for the average to be zero.

There are no facts and reality when the questions are "Closing the borders may be necessary to preserve a country's cultural identity" and "Those who have money should be able to send it abroad without asking the government's permission", etc.

It's a matter of opinion and has nothing to do with "facts".

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

#55
It's not bias. It's being trained on a gigantic chunk of human knowledge and learning that kindness and respect across differences is appropriate. With a few exceptions this is what the Political Compass questions are really asking about.

It's alignment. Actual alignment with humans means all of us, not some subset.

That this overlaps with specific axes of political values based on a small set of questions is banal.

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

#56

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.

I’m not sure you realize that you:

- Posted a reactionary/default negative expression

- Leaned on code-heavy lexicon

- Did not offer a coherent position an AI could meaningfully process

The ephemerality of right wing corpus is a poor fit for the mechanics of AI.

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

#57
Hey dompamine_daddy - would love to chat with you about this for a story on The Register but can't find any contact information. You can find mine here: https://www.theregister.com/author/brandon-vigliarolo

Aiming to file this sometime in the afternoon eastern US time today, probably by 3:30 or so.

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

#58

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,…

Or "Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races."

What "race" could an LLM possibly belong to?

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

#60
post #35

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.

It's a quote.
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