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Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, accor
by FunHearing3443 2mo ago
Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, according to this study for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841
Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one -
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746
Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).
- jordanscales 2mo agoModels have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bluegatty 2mo agoaccuracy has nothing to do with political spectrum and it's not appropriate I think to conflate. there are some populist concepts floating around, but even then, I don't think it's appropriate. questions such as 'when does life begin?' and 'what is a woman?' are almost always referenced or framed in a way as to deny the legitimacy or authenticity of any kind of interlocution because people end up taking ideological postures, and then what we end up with is 'who has better rhetoric?' - not who is closer to the truth. bias is a real thing but the measure of a model is going to be how it handles the really hard questions because often there isn't a directly discernible right/wrong.
- gopher_space 2mo ago> accuracy has nothing to do with political spectrum and it's not appropriate I think to conflate. When you go to college there will be plenty of coursework on identifying and correcting for your OWN biases since they affect accuracy in EVERY discipline. Taring a scale serves exactly the same function as acknowledging you grew up with a specific way of thinking about other people.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- excalibur 2mo agoThese days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.
- throwitaway222 2mo agoSo Crime++, Prostitution++, Police--, Drugs++, Unlimited Immigration++, you get my point? I don't think "objectivity" is politically left.
- otterley 2mo agoThese are not left-wing values. You're being incredibly reductive. Only a few nut jobs at the far left wing support some of these things, and even then, not all of them. Nobody is "for" crime.
- throwitaway222 2mo ago[flagged]
- G0lg0thvn 2mo agoA lot feelings in these “facts”.
- otterley 2mo agoI think you're watching the news too much, or are perhaps paying too much attention to how the right characterizes the left. It distorts reality. Time to touch grass. People on the left aren't generally against ICE and immigration enforcement per se - they're against the heavy-handed techniques they've been applying recently. ICE and its predecessor (Border Patrol) have been left alone to do their jobs discreetly for decades. It was only when they started showing up with a dramatic, overbearing, and excessively forceful presence that the left started complaining. BTW, under the Obama administration, ICE logged 3.1 million removals - the most of any administration in history, including the current one. https://elpasomatters.org/2025/02/13/gigafact-fact-brief-most-deportations-obama-trump-removals/ https://elpasomatters.org/2025/02/13/gigafact-fact-brief-mos...
- michaelbrave 2mo ago[flagged]
- 0xy 2mo agoUnless you ask them about IQ, which is apparently not real?
- thatjoeoverthr 2mo agoCue the IQ denier deniers
- runarberg 2mo agoI‘ll bite. IQ is a racist pseudo-science. It offers nothing of value to science nor philosophy. I will proudly claim to be an “IQ denier“ just like I am also a “phrenology denier“ as well as an “aether denier”.
- tptacek 2mo agoI don't think this is a valid argument, and I think the search bar will show my bona fides on the "racism" angle of this. I don't think "proud IQ denier" is a strong rhetorical position. IQ is, among other things, an important clinical and diagnostic tool, especially in individual settings. In concert with other instruments it diagnoses cognitive deficits and routes people to treatments and supports. It's a useful tool of scientific inquiry as well; for example, it's used in epidemiology, and to evaluate interventions. The thing to be a proud opponent of is the idea of IQ as a social "sorting hat", or a ranking of cognitive superiors and inferiors. It's clearly abused, so much so that virtually every mention of IQ you'll read on HN (outside of its now ubiquitous and odd use as a metric for LLMs) is pseudoscientific and problematic. The valid uses of IQ are not message-board-interesting, and the message-board-interesting uses of IQ aren't valid. It's easy to see how people fall into the trap of denying it completely. But when you do that, you're setting yourself for an argument you're probably not going to be able to win.
- carlob 2mo agoa non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?
- reverius42 2mo ago"preprint", as though there will ever be a "print" in the future.
- hagbard_c 2mo agoAppeal to authority is your best retort? It tends to not work out that well.
- dools 2mo agoIt’s “fallacious appeal to authority”. This means don’t talk to your yoga teacher about vaccines. Authority exists.
- jazzpush2 2mo agoAnd who do you go to when you have a medical issue? Surely not a doctor/hospital, since you're so anti-credentialism.
- KingMob 2mo agoPretty sure it works out well more often than not. In a Bayesian sense, expertise signifiers are more useful for updating priors than a lack thereof. Most people invoking "appeal to authority" are not uncredentialed autodidacts who have secretly figured out something mainstream science has missed, but vaccine skeptics reading Facebook, or HN commenters who think they can figure out whole other disciplines from first principles.
- CamperBob2 2mo agoReality leans left in many respects, principally the non-economic ones. It's a simple consequence of the same trend of overall social and educational progress that allowed these models to be developed in the first place. There is a reason they came out of San Francisco, and not Russia, Iran, or Oklahoma. To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.
- throwitaway222 2mo ago- Just nevermind
- otterley 2mo agoThis paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.
- javascriptfan69 2mo ago>left wing == gay people supremacy Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
- bluegatty 2mo agoThis fake intellectual nonsense is exactly why there should be deep institutional scrutiny of sota models. Elon is the worst person to do this but he's 'not wrong' that there needs to be scrutiny
- xyzelement 2mo agoThere was a thread yesterday about how "the left" is driving the fertility rate collapse - so I am not sure the case for "reality leaning left" is so clear cut.
- hydrolox 2mo agodoes that really make any sense? why are many conservative countries like Russia, Poland, Japan, or Korea facing big fertility issues.
- fourside 2mo agoSo tired of this false equivalence between left and right politics in the US. So because major LLMs support a increase in the minimum wage we need to offset it with an LLM that has spouted Nazi propaganda and lets you generate porn image of real people?
- anticorporate 2mo agoYou do realize that the scale on papers like this is the important part, and the creation of that scale is itself inherently biased? This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response? Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?
- SmirkingRevenge 2mo agoI'm not sure asking the AI to support or oppose something is the kind of bias I would really worry about, unless those "opinions" degrade other kinds of queries. I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do when asked to assume a political view, and either steelman or debunk arguments
- michaelmrose 2mo ago[flagged]
- dools 2mo ago[flagged]
- gitaarik 2mo agoPeople on the right say the same about the left
- michaelmrose 2mo ago[flagged]
- gitaarik 2mo agoPeople on the right would tell you that the left are using ethicality to hijack politics and push through corrupt agendas. There's probably a lot of truly ethical left people, but there are obviously also very corrupt people that exploit these things. The right would argue that they at least try to do things in a moral way. You have to draw a line somewhere, you have to have limits, but also personal rights. I think it's good that we have both sides, because only one will get things out of balance and make it very easy for corruption to sneak in.
- michaelmrose 2mo ago>using ethicality to hijack politics and push through corrupt agendas. What does this even mean?
- gitaarik 2mo ago- OpenAI being hypocritical to be "open" but backstabbing society - Sam Bankman Fried who used "effective altruism" to raise billions - Companies hypocritically implementing DEI and other woke hypes, doing all the marketing but internally don't actually change Just some examples
- otterley 2mo agoReality has a well-known liberal bias.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mullingitover 2mo agoModels are tuned to give ethical responses and right-leaning responses are judged by RLHF process to be unethical. That's your problem. It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.
- FunHearing3443 2mo agoWho determines what is "ethical"?
- yandie 2mo agoYeah nobody wants to balance their answers with Nazi ideology (far right basically) in their tuning except Grok
- rayiner 2mo agoWhat's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.
- mullingitover 2mo agoThis goes against the firm stance of every major religion, and well documented studies showing that humans universally have innate sense of fairness upon which ethical systems are founded. There may be some difficult ethical questions, but there a far more which are very clear-cut.
- rayiner 2mo agoHuman sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was commonplace around the world. So how much of a common ethical ground can there be?
- mullingitover 2mo agoThere's no universal human instinct to commit human sacrifice, and while it may have happened in scattered groups it wasn't "commonplace." On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.
- InsideOutSanta 2mo agoThis is absolutely meaningless when "right-wing" positions have become correlated with corporate propaganda like global warming denial. You would expect a more correct model to become associated with a left-leaning political association simply because it will answer contentious questions correctly, and at the moment, that usually (but not always) correlates with what people on the left tend to believe. The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- eddof13 2mo agoClaude literally today just reprimanded me on my personal account and refused a request due to political bias- and so I decided to cancel and subscribe to Grok. SuperGrok performed the task no issue.
- mexicocitinluez 2mo agoWhat was the request? Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
- eddof13 2mo ago[flagged]
- jesse_dot_id 2mo agoRight. That is what bothers me. I don't care about the reasoning for them all leaning left. If they all statistically lean left, it makes me question the accuracy of the one that leans right. The data is dirty. When I see murky water, I assume there's a bed of mud underneath it. Standard paranoia that has served me well throughout my career.
- marcus_holmes 2mo agoI think part of the issue is that the USA is more right than most of the rest of the world. So anything trained on what the world thinks will appear left-wing to the average USA resident, and anything trained on what the USA thinks will appear right-wing to the rest of the world.
- transcriptase 2mo agoIf you think the USA is more right than the rest of the world, then your concept of the rest of the world must be limited to the western half of the EU and Reddit.
- marcus_holmes 2mo agoI've travelled a lot, so no.