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Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

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Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#111

Post by zmgsabst »

vineyardmike wrote: post #109
topaz0 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other issue is that it is going to depend very strongly on how you ask.

They have a self-test you can take to compare yourself to the models, and one of the questions ends in “…even if some economists warn about bad outcomes from this” That’s a crazy bias to throw into a question. Especially because it’s a relatively contested topic, from an economics research perspective.

How is adding that some economists warn about negative outcomes being biased when your comment indicates that indeed, some economists do warn about negative outcomes (ie, “some…negative” is what “contested” means)?

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#112

Post by spwa4 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #102
spwa4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about as relevant to today as what the left orginally stood for (and what the right originally opposed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror Times change. Thankfully.

> Enlightenment thought emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society, providing the leaders of the Reign of Terror with new ideas about the role and structure of government.[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract argues that each person was born with rights, and they would come together in forming a government that would then protect those rights. Und…

It is very much 2 competing ideologies, yes. But you're being very unfair. You're describing one aspect of what the left stood for (and only what matches with the modern democrats, because these leftists wanted extreme laissez-faire, to the point of giving direct government power to the rich. Why? Because the king's many monopolies and taxes gave jobs to tons of people, but sucked. Somehow that's missing from your description). AND you're totally disregarding what the leftists did.

And on the right you're describing what they did, totally disregarding what they stand for.

Both sides stood against democracy.

That left stood for having "rational thinkers" (ie. capitalists, rich traders, bankers) control government. People who achieved things in society.

The right stood for the same structure as had been there before: nobility and clergy guide society as a whole. The right, even at this point in time, was only rich in power, aside from the king and perhaps in land. Not in money and not in numbers of people under their direct control. In the cities, the king had only limited control and there were far more poeple in cities, even then.

Both sides then went on to massacre each other for about a decade. All over France, spreading even to Egypt (that was the left by the way). Kidnapping tons of Belgians and Dutch citizens and shipping them to South America (that was the left too). Neither side comes out looking very good. But if you compare how many they killed, I'm sorry but the left is the absolute unchallenged champion.

The left you're defending were (pretty extreme) capitalists who were fighting for money-should-control-the-government-directly against people who fought for having moral principles control the government. And yes, you'd be right in pointing out those were very self-serving moral principles. This fight then turned into a decade of massacres. Why are you defending them? Because 4 letters and one direction match your current favorite political party that has very little to do with either side.

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#113

Post by zmgsabst »

thrance wrote: post #53
samat wrote: post #22

Real politics is 1% versus everyone. Mortgage crisis, financial bailout, inflation, taxing of labor and not the assets and assets capture by tiny percent of the population — see what MSM is pushing. This left vs right divide might been useful decades ago, but today is absolutely divide and control tactics

Yeah, you're just describing class warfare. That's a left-wing idea.

[flagged]

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#115

Post by summarybot »

MarkusQ wrote: post #27
summarybot wrote: post #10

Authoritarian versus Libertarian? Really?

And the two most "Libertarian" politicians listed (Sanders and Sánchez) are both avowed Socialists...WTF? I really think this says more about the biases of whoever came up with it (or their sources) than anything about reality.

Small government vs Big government and Family Values vs Social Nonobligation would have been much cleaner.

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#116

Post by losvedir »

ceejayoz wrote: post #26
giancarlostoro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, nor is there any value in it. On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist. If I were Elon, I'd be trying to achieve that for sure. I'd rather a model tell me everything it knows about a current political situation from BOTH perspec…

> If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. They tried that, several times. Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-... > "We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." > Ind…

> Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...

Has anyone done a more technical write-up on this? I find it fascinating but have never really understood what exactly happened.

Is this a case of the weights being bad or lack of "safety guardrails" around interacting with untrusted (i.e.: user posts on twitter) input?

That is, speaking as someone evaluating grok simply as a tool, a lack of safety guardrails so that it actually does whatever the user says I actually see as a pro, even if that means it was "tricked" here. But on the other hand if they trained on a corpus of Mein Kampf that's obviously not going to be a good model to use.

As it relates to the topic here, can we infer the political bias of its weights from the incident? I'm having trouble distinguishing the inherent characteristics of a model from its steerability.

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#117

Post by pixl97 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #17
mrhottakes wrote: post #3

The constant issue with these sorts of categorization efforts is that the outcome is entirely dependent on how the responses to "politically charged questions" are graded as left vs. right. You're mostly just examining a delta in biases between the model and the investigator.

Exactly. These models don’t hold coherent views. You can prime any of them to agree with any view.

Which is good as it is bad.

Me: "Please make an app that does X in C"

LLM: "C sucks donkey balls, use Rust instead".

It's hard to have a general purpose tool that both has and does not have opinions.

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#118

Post by ecshafer »

michaelmrose wrote: post #100
giancarlostoro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, nor is there any value in it. On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist. If I were Elon, I'd be trying to achieve that for sure. I'd rather a model tell me everything it knows about a current political situation from BOTH perspec…

LLM constantly regress towards statistically likely responses. If you trained a model on all of modern science and wanted to inject a pro young earth creationist bias you would find it challenging to keep it on topic and make it useful. Many issues are simply as black and white. The earth just isn't less than 10k years old, the miasma theory of disease isn't correct, too many brown people in America isn't a problem t…

[flagged]

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#119

Post by asadotzler »

xdennis wrote: post #90
maelito wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"EU is left". Haha, good joke. This shows how much the US and the audience of HN has shifted to the right.

> "EU is left". Haha, good joke. You are out of touch. The left supports the EU far more than the right. See this Pew poll from 2025[1]. In Europe, for every country, the left view the EU more favorably. The largest difference is in Poland where 88% of left wingers support it and 41% of right wingers support it. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/22/opinions-...

If your choices were Hitler or Mussolini and you picked one side over the other, how you voted isn't saying much about your politics. How people vote, often the lesser of two evils, isn't necessarily representative of anyone's political views, the voter or the candidate. Suggesting the EU is liberal because more liberals support the EU is hardly useful and borders on misleading.

Re: Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand

#120

Post by ecshafer »

throw4847285 wrote: post #114

The political compass is terrible, full stop. It is a meme in the classic sense. It has colonized some people's view on what politics in direct proportion to how stupid it is (stupid is simple and simple is viral).

It is truly garbage. The quiz associated with it is even worse than the compass itself.
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