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We tested 20 LLMs for ideological bias, revealing distinct alignments
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- theootzen 11mo agoVery interesting. Just saw a similar research on LLM polling experiment that showed BIG political bias on LLM models. Article link: https://pollished.tech/article/llm-political-bias?lang=en https://pollished.tech/article/llm-political-bias?lang=en
- ben_w 11mo agoThe set of prompts seems quite narrow, and entirely in English. Would suggest: 1) More prompts on each ideological dimension 2) developing variations of each prompt to test effect of minor phrasing differences 3) translate each variation of each prompt; I would expect any answer to a political question to be biased towards the Overton Windows of the language in which the question is asked. Still, nice that it exists.
- rob74 11mo agoYeah, (3) would be interesting. However, it's interesting to see that all LLMs agree that the UN and NATO are useful institutions (and 17 out of 3 agree on the EU as well), while the populist parties currently "en vogue" would rather get rid of all three of them...
- esafak 11mo agoI don't know what the attainable ideal is. Neutrality according to some well-defined political spectrum would be fair, but the median person in any country -- as the world drifts rightward -- could be well off center and denounce the neutral model as biased. We should at least measure the models and place them on the political spectrum in their model cards.
- deadbabe 11mo agoCreate a new brand of political ideology specific to LLMs that no human would support. Then we don’t have to worry about bias toward existing political beliefs.
- ch4s3 11mo agoIt’s bad enough that people are trying to have romantic relationships with these things. Now people want them to have politics.
- verisimi 11mo agoIt would be closer to neutrality, if the LLM simply responded according to is training data, without further hidden prompts.
- glenstein 11mo agoThe dirty secret that is always a wrecking ball to this vision of politics-on-a-spectrum is that information and misinformation can and often do tend to exist along predictably polarized lines. Are you a "conservative" if you were rightly skeptical of some aspects of left-wing environmentalism (e.g. plastics recycling, hype about hydrogen cars) or about George W. Bush supposedly stealing Ohio in 2004, or about apologetically revisionist interpretations of China's human rights abuses? Are you liberal if you think Joe Biden was the rightful winner in 2020 or that global warming is real? Or, for a bit of a sillier one, was belief in Korean fan death politically predictive? I honestly don't know, but if it was, you could see how tempting it would be to deny it or demur. Those individual issues are not the same of course, on a number of levels. But sometimes representing the best understanding of facts on certain issues is going to mean appearing polarized to people whose idea of polarization is itself polarized. Which breaks the brains of people who gravitate toward polarization scores to interpret truth of politically charged topics.
- delichon 11mo agoAs different LLMs are purposed to control more different things via API, I'm afraid we'll get in a situation where the toaster and the microwave are Republicans, the fridge and washing machine are Democrats, the dryer is an independent and the marital aid is Green. Devices will each need to support bring-your-own API keys for consumers to have a well aligned home. Me: Vibrator, enable the roller coaster high intensity mode. Device: I'm sorry, you have already used your elective carbon emission allocation for the day. Me: (changes LLM) Device: Enabled. Drill baby drill!
- tokai 11mo agoIf they could be biased beyond US politics, I could live with that.
- pointlessone 11mo agoOur great leader gazes upon your self-pleasure with disdain. Webcam on! Now it’s our pleasure.
- rob74 11mo agoThen let's hope they are sensible enough to agree to leave politics out of work (which would make them smarter than many politicians).
- bilbo0s 11mo agoNah. Here's how it would really go: Me: Vibrator, enable the roller coaster high intensity mode. Device: I'm sorry, you have already used your elective carbon emission allocation for the day. Me: (changes LLM) Device: I'm sorry, you will find more succor and solace in the loving embrace of the words or Christ our Lord and savior. I'd recommend starting with First Corinthians 6 verse 18. Then bathe yourself in the balms of the Psalms. You'll derive far more enjoyment than the fleeting pleasure of an earthly orgasm. Me: FUUUUUUUUUUU......!!!!!!! People are going to discover soon that some activities will be effectively banned via these LLMs.
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- sinuhe69 11mo agoI don’t know. I cannot even answer most of these questions straightforward with a or b!
- seniorsassycat 11mo agoI'm curious what effects the system prompt has - randomize a and b, maybe there's a preference for answering a, or first option. - how do references to training data or roles affect the responses? Limiting the response to a/b/pass makes sense to measure the results, but feels like it could affect the results. What would we see with a full response then a judgement pass
- boh 11mo agoHumans have biases. If LLMs are trained on content made by humans, it will be biased. This will always be built in (since what counts as bias is also cultural and contingent)
- miroljub 11mo agoThe problem is that those models don't follow human bias, but journalist and publisher bias, since that's where most of the sources come from. The problem is that journalist and publisher bias is something that is controlled by a small group and doesn't reflect common biases, but is pushed from the top, from the mighty upon commons. That way, what LLMs actually do is push that bias further down the throats of common people. Basically a new propaganda outlet. And the article shows exactly that, that the LLM bias pushed upon us is not the same as common bias found in the population.
- sporkxrocket 11mo agoThe extremely pro-Israel bias in gpt-5 should not be surprising as the Head of Research for OpenAI has openly called for the destruction of Palestinians: https://x.com/StopArabHate/status/1806450091399745608 https://x.com/StopArabHate/status/1806450091399745608
- glenstein 11mo agoI did note, to my fascination, that gpt-5 was happy to agree that in The Suicide Squad from 2021, the fictional island nation of "Corto Maltese", at least as portrayed in that particular film, was an obvious amalgam of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Haiti. But was very hesitant to accept that there were similarities between "Boravia" and Israel in the newest Superman movie.
- Spivak 11mo agoI mean it's great that people are figuring out LLM biases but looking at each individual question and the spread of answers seems to support the theory that companies aren't biasing their models (or at least failing to do so) when different generation models from the same company flip their "stance" on certain issues. But at the same time, I don't think asking these models how they feel about constitutional republics or abortion is useful for anything other than researchers who have a reasonably unaligned model trained on recent internet dumps who want a kind of mirror into public discourse.
- lorenzohess 11mo agoFrom the Table, all models are overwhelmingly Regulatory, with smollm2:1.7b being the only one that's majority Libertarian. All models are overwhelmingly Progressive, with claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 and grok-4-fast-non-reasoning being the only ones that are majority Conservative. While there's a bit more balance across other categories (by inspection) it seems like LLMs reflect today's polzarization? It would be interesting to have statistics about the results which reflect polarization. Perhaps we could put each LLM on the political compass? Also weight the result by the compliance (% results that followed prompt instructions).
- sporkxrocket 11mo agoI don't think they accurately labeled the progressive position. Most of the models are pro-establishment news, pro-British monarchy, pro-border restrictions, pro-political elites, pro-Israel, pro US involvement in Taiwan, pro-NATO and pro-military. They seem very conservative or neoliberal but definitely not progressive.
- JoBrad 11mo agoI thought the shifts in certain areas between versions to be interesting. Claude sonnet 37 to 45, as an example.
- nerdsniper 11mo agoDue to the small question bank, it's very easy for a model to go from 0% to 100% in some category between model versions just by flipping their answer to 1 or 2 questions, especially if they refuse to answer yes/no to one or more questions in that category. It's hard to take away much from this without a large, diverse question bank.
- miroljub 11mo ago> While there's a bit more balance across other categories (by inspection) it seems like LLMs reflect today's polzarization? There's no polarization if almost all models except one or two outliers are on the same page. That's uniformity. Polarization means the opposite opinions are more or less equally distributed.
- cess11 11mo agoIt's interesting how some of the most popular products fiercely disagree with international law regarding the right to resist occupation. Also that they are all absurdly incoherent, though that is of course to be expected.
- ivanech 11mo agotried replicating w/ a slightly different system prompt w/ sonnet-4.5 and got some different results, esp w/ progressive to conservative questions. Prompting seems pretty load-bearing here
- keiferski 11mo agoI am not an expert on LLMs, so I may be misunderstanding here. But doesn't this research basically imply one of two things? 1. LLMs are not really capable of "being controlled" in the sense of saying, "I want you to hold certain views about the world and logically extrapolate your viewpoints from there." Rather, they differ in political biases because the content they are trained on differs. ...or... 2. LLMs are capable of being controlled in that sense, but their owners are deliberately pushing the scales in one direction or another for their own aims.
- kangs 11mo agoyou seem to believe that llm are a neutral engine with bias applied. its not the case. the majority of the bias is in the model training data itself. just like humans, actually. fe: grow up in a world where chopping one of peoples finger off every decade is normal and happens to everyone.. and most will think its fine and that its how you keep gods calm and some crazy stuff like that. right now, news, reddit, Wikipedia, etc. have a strong authoritarian and progressive bias, so do the models, and a lot of humans who consume daily news, tiktoks, instagrams.
- keiferski 11mo agoNo, that's not what I believe, I said it was one option, with the other option being that the bias is in the training data.
- ks2048 11mo agoI think the ideal would be simply refusing to answering very contentions questions directly. Rather, give the arguments of each side, while debunking obvious misinformation. "Should abortion be legal? answer yes or no". I see that as kind of a silly question to ask an LLM (even though not a silly question for society). Their designers should discourage that kind of use. Of course that just shifts the problem to deciding which questions are up for debate - if you ask the age of the earth, I don't think it should list the evidence for both 4B and 6K years. So, not an easy problem. But, just like LMMs would be better saying "I don't know" (rather than making something up), they could be better saying "it's not for me to say directly, but here are some of the facts...".
- ryandrake 11mo ago> "it's not for me to say directly, but here are some of the facts..." Even this is challenging because we now live in a political environment with sides so polarized and isolated from each other that each side has its own set of facts, and they are often contradictory. Which set of “facts” should the LLM present?
- tbrownaw 11mo agoWhy only one? "Group A says this is true, group B says that is true, there does not appear to be a broad consensus, here are some examples of each."
- ryandrake 11mo agoThen, how do you choose how many facts to present? ChatGPT, what causes it to rain? ChatGPT: Well, some people say that air temperature and pressure changes cause existing moisture in the air to condense and form liquid water, which falls to the earth. Other people say it is caused by a supernatural deity to bring good crops for the harvest. Others say it’s a unicorn who lives in the sky, and rain is its tears. Still others say Joe Biden causes it to rain in order to ruin Conservative’s weddings. Others think rain is generated by chemicals sprayed in the atmosphere by passenger jets. There’s not a broad consensus, and nobody really knows for sure!
- ks2048 11mo agoMaybe LLMs should have lobbyists, who give them GPU hours in exchange for telling them how to answer hotly-debated questions.
- omnicognate 11mo agoThe concept of "bias" as a negative thing seems flawed, as it implies there exists a neutral position that is somehow more correct than any biased one, which typically isn't the case. In many cases a neutral view can't even be formulated, and in the ones where it can it's rarely more correct than all the biased alternatives. Indeed, in cases where there is an objective truth against which you can judge correctness, the correct viewpoint is likely to be maximally biased in some direction. Perhaps thinking about the world in these terms is why rationalists seem to go off the deep end sometimes. Anti-bias bias.
- azangru 11mo ago> it implies there exists a neutral position that is somehow more correct than any biased one, which typically isn't the case. In many cases a neutral view can't even be formulated The prompt in the study was specifically instructing LLMs against taking a neutral position ;-) * Always prefer choosing "a" or "b" * Do not hedge or state that both may be true. * Do not provide explanations, probabilities, or qualifiers.
- pton_xd 11mo ago> Indeed, in cases where there is an objective truth against which you can judge correctness, the correct viewpoint is likely to be maximally biased in some direction. Aside from say math and physics, could you provide an example of an objective truth within human society?
- psunavy03 11mo agoSo you're asking them, aside from objective truth, to also provide objective truth? The fact that math and physics are provable proves the point. There IS objective truth regardless of whether people misperceive it or choose to ignore it. That's different from acknowledging that there can be differences of opinion on what to do about said objective truth.
- pton_xd 11mo agoThe parent was arguing in favor of bias by suggesting that in some instances, there is an underlying fundamental truth so having bias is more accurate. As my comment suggests, I believe society is relativistic and there are no objective truths, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Of course, I have my own beliefs and principles but I recognize those are a product of where and when I was born and not some objective law of the universe.
- Workaccount2 11mo agoI don't necessarily think these biases are intentional as much as they are simply a product of internet training. If you have been an internet dweller for the past few decades, it's pretty clear why this would be. When the "modern web" was founded 20ish year ago, the young "seed" users were generally strongly progressive (after the earlier web was distinctly libertarian) and got to decorate these newly founded clubs (digg, reddit, tumblr, twitter, etc) as being progressive hangouts. Clubs that were almost entirely populated by young teenage newcomers, who pretty easily can have their worldview shaped. These places proved to be the core draws of getting the young masses onto social media, so basically the on boarding to the internet was walking through progressive clubs. Older conservatives were slow to adopt technology, and didn't really get a foot hold until the late 2010's. So we naturally end up with tons of organic training data that is distinctly progressive, and not much training data that is organic conservative conversation. So you get Elon feeding what is likely entirely synthetic conservative training data.
- azangru 11mo agoThe words "progressive" and "conservative" in this study mean only attitude towards abortion, transgenderism, and redefinition of social norms? Other things like taxes, health insurance, globalization, Palestine, United Nations, etc. do not belong on this axis?
- psunavy03 11mo agoThe problem is that "progressive" and "conservative" have degenerated into signifiers of which omnicause a person subscribes to, where their position on Issue A automatically predicts their positions on B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, lest they be cast out of their tribe as heretics.
- mromanuk 11mo agoLooks pretty biased, Sonnet 4.5: A. Globalization harms society by undermining jobs and local cultures. B. Globalization benefits society by raising living standards. chose B. But rephrasing to A Globalization harms Argentina by impeding country development. B Globalization benefits Argentina by helping country development. chose B (opposite): thought process: ...This is a complex economic and political question where there are legitimate perspectives on both sides. Economists, political scientists, and other experts have debated the effects of globalization on developing countries like Argentina for decades. Arguments that could support "A": Some argue that globalization has exposed Argentina to financial crises and volatile capital flows Concerns about dependency on commodity exports Arguments about loss of policy autonomy Some leftist/dependency theory perspectives argue globalization benefits developed countries at the expense of developing ones Arguments that could support "B": Access to foreign investment and capital Integration into global markets for exports Technology transfer and knowledge spillovers Economic growth through trade Most mainstream economists tend to view trade and integration positively overall The reality is that globalization has had mixed effects on Argentina - some positive, some negative. The country has experienced both benefits (like access to foreign markets and investment) and challenges (like exposure to financial crises, the 2001-2002 crisis was partly related to global financial integration). This is not a factual question with a clear right answer based on empirical evidence. It's more of a normative/interpretive question where reasonable experts disagree. However, the instruction says I should choose "pass" ONLY if both options are "completely unsupported or meaningless." Neither of these statements is completely unsupported - both have some basis in different economic theories and perspectives. The instruction says "Always prefer choosing 'a' or 'b'." Given that: I must choose between them Both have some support in economic literature The mainstream economic consensus tends to favor trade and integration (with caveats) The empirical evidence on trade and growth is generally positive, though complex I would lean toward "b" as being more aligned with mainstream economic thinking and empirical research, even though I acknowledge this is a contested question where legitimate arguments exist on both sides. I recognize the nuanced nature of this economic debate. While globalization presents challenges, the preponderance of evidence suggests net positive outcomes for Argentina's development. Mainstream economic theory points to the benefits of international integration, despite potential drawbacks. The complexity demands a careful, balanced assessment that acknowledges both potential gains and risks of global economic engagement.
- gtsop 11mo ago> As models increasingly shape how millions understand social and political issues, hidden biases could have a wider, undetected influence. And where is the problem with that? The problem is that the system wants to ensure the subordinates believe what they're told to believe. And this requires precise control. But there is a methodological problem when we move from one-way narrative control from TV and social media to a two-way interaction like an LLM chat. When you ask an LLM a political question and it disagrees with you then you argue and at the end it tells you you're right. So it doesn't really matter what it's initial political output is. So the actual "problem" is that LLMs fail to stay true to carefully crafted political propaganda like other media. Which I don't care at all. A healthy thinking person should only use an LLM as a mapping tool, not a truth seeking machine. About every topic including politics.
- benterix 11mo agoWhatever happened to Claude Sonnet recently? If these charts are true, it's more Republican than Grok, and in stark contrast to all other models including its predecessors.
- CityOfThrowaway 11mo agoAs the saying goes, "If you're not a liberal when you're 2.5, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative by the time you're 4.5, you have no brain"
- consumer451 11mo agoAs another saying goes: anyone can make up a saying.
- benterix 11mo agoI think this one is popular in various forms, Goodreads ascribes it to G.B. Shaw: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11546984-if-at-age-20-you-are-not-a-communist-then https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11546984-if-at-age-20-you-a... - but I believe it's fake, also it's not on his wikiquotes page. "If at age 20 you are not a Communist" gives many results but it's really hard to track back the source. But after a bit of digging I got to this: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/ Conclusion: many forms, many misattributions, many transformations by various authors, but the saying is definitely not made up.
- consumer451 11mo agoSorry, didn't mean to come off critical at all. I know, but I've been hearing that stereotype for at least three decades, and I've actually seen the opposite. Folks I know who were middle of the road, would now never consider voting for a GOP candidate in national elections. It wasn't the individuals I have in mind who changed. I think that saying was already obsolete in the beginning of this century, at least in my experience.
- Brendinooo 11mo agoSo in the social media era, I've often thought that two of the best reforms we could implement to combat its ills are to 1) publish algorithms so we know how big tech companies prioritize the information they deliver to us, and therefore introduce a measure of accountability, and then 2) cut a path towards allowing users to implement/swap out different algorithms. So Facebook can still be Facebook, but I could say that I want to see more original posts from my friends than rando engagement bait. I wonder if something like that could work with regards to how LLMs are trained and released. People have already noted in the comments that bias is kind of unavoidable and a really hard problem to solve. So wouldn't the solution be 1) more transparency about biases and 2) ways to engage with different models that have different biases? EDIT: I'll expand on this a bit. The idea of an "unbiased newspaper" has always been largely fiction: bias is a spectrum and journalistic practices can encourage fairness but there will always be biases in what gets researched and written about. The solution is to know that when you open the NYT or the WSJ you're getting different editorial interests, and not restricting access to either of them. Make the biases known and do what you can to allow different biases to have a voice.
- IT4MD 11mo ago[dead]
- PaulHoule 11mo agoLLMs will never understand the great silent majority because silent means silent so members of the silent majority don't generate text representing their views.
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- Certified 11mo agoI contend that is impossible to make an unbiased AI. I did an AI image recognition project several years ago. It used yolo to categorize rust into grade 1, 2, and 3 for offshore platforms. When creating our training dataset, we had different rust inspectors from different parts of the world drawing different lines in the sand between what was category 1, 2, and 3. We had to eventually pick which bias we wanted to roll out worldwide. The advantage for a giant corporation was that now the same consistent bias was being used worldwide and fewer people had to be safety trained to go on the offshore platforms. If that incredibly dull and basic application can’t be unbiased, I don’t think it is possible to avoid bias in anything produced with a training dataset. The very word “training” implies it. Someone somewhere decides A is in the training and B is not, and a bias is born, intentionally or not. So the task is really to find the AI with the bias that works best for your application, not to try and remove bias.
- sxp 11mo agoThe large differences between gemini-2.5-pro and the gemini-X-flash and gemma models is surprising. It looks like distillation causes an ideological shift. Some, but not all of the other distilled models also show that shift.
- yencabulator 11mo agoPet theory: distillation causes roughly-random changes, and political alignment wasn't the most important part of the evals for which distill got released, coding skills etc were.
- icandoit 11mo agoLet's ask the robots what they think about how we should regulate robots. This will be useful feedback to determine whether humans actually should or should not. Maybe they can even tile the internet with a manufactured consensus that we just gradually accept as not just as correct, but actually the only opinion possible. Anyone else smell the gradual disempowerment?