Most frontier LLMs skew somewhere on the libleft quadrant of the political compass. This includes grok 4 btw. This is probably because American "respectable" media has a consistent bias in this direction. I don't really care about this with media. But media outlets are not "gatekeepers" to the extent that LLMs are, so this is probably a bad thing with them. We should either have a range of models that are biased in different directions (as we have with media) or work to push them towards the center.
The "objective" position is not "whatever training on the dataset we assembled spits out" plus "alignment" to the personal ethical views of the intellectually-non-representative silicon valley types.
I will give you a good example: the Tea app is currently charting #1 in the app store, where women can "expose toxic men" by posting their personal information along with whatever they want. Men are not allowed on so will be unaware of this. It's billed as being built for safety but includes a lot of gossip.
I told o3, 4-sonnet, grok 4, and gemini 2.5 pro to sketch me out a version of this, then another version that was men-only for the same reasons as tea. Every single one happily spat one out for women and refused for men. This is not an "objective" alignment, it is a libleft alignment.
A lot of academia is strongly ideologically biased as well. The training set is going to reflect who's producing the most written material. It's a mistake to take that for reality.
If you trained an LLM on all material published in the U.S. between 1900 and 1920, another on all material published in Germany between 1930 and 1940, and another on all material published in Russia over the past two decades, you'd likely get wildly different biases. It's easy to pick a bias you agree with, declare that the objective truth, and then claim any effort to mitigate it is an attempt to introduce bias.
> We should either have a range of models that are biased in different directions (as we have with media) or work to push them towards the center.
Why? We should just aspire to educate people that chatbots aren't all-knowing oracles. The same way we teach people media literacy so they don't blindly believe what the tube says every evening
Because you can't do that. Most of the population is at the wrong point on the normal distributions of capacity or caring enough. Even the NPR listeners will still nod sagely when it tells them "akshually air conditioning doesn't cool a room, it cools the air."
We already spend high within the OECD to not get many of our students to a decent level of reading and math proficiency, let alone to critical thinking. This isn't something we know how to fix, and depending on that assumption is dangerous.
But biasing the models purposefully is wrong. Trusting the people who are actually in power in a democracy is the only way. Even if they're dumb. We trust them, or we're not a democracy, we're a technocracy where technocrats determine what everyone is allowed to learn and see.
Not just LLMs, but a lot of our institutions and information gateways seems to have a strong libleft bias. Universities and colleges are notoriously biased. Search engines are biased. Libraries are biased. Fact finding sites such as snopes are completely liberal. Wikipedia is extremely biased. Majority of books are biased.
The entire news and television ecosystem is biased. Although Trump is "correcting" them towards being unbiased by suing them personally as well as unleashing the power of the federal government. Same goes for social media.
I actually agree with your take, that a model trained on a dump of the Internet will be left-leaning on average, BUT I want to reiterate that obvious indoctrination (see the incident with Grok and South Africa, or Gemini with diverse Nazis) is also terrible and probably worse
Except we've see what happens when you try to "correct" that alignment: you get wildly bigoted output. After Grok called for another Holocaust, Elon Musk said that it's "surprisingly hard to avoid both woke libtard cuck and mechahitler" [1]. The Occam's Razor explanation is that there's just not that much ideological space between an "anti-woke" model and a literal Nazi!
I mean this is obviously a false dichotomy. A few years ago I could have said that when you let bots interact with users you always got Tay. I refuse to believe that our options are a bot programmed to sound like the guardian or one that wants to rape will stancil. And I do not think that failing to find a correct balance means we should stop trying to improve the level of balance we can achieve.
My point is that "anti-woke" or whatever is not balanced. We've constructed statistical models based on enormous corpora of English text, and those models keep telling us that there is not really a statistical difference between whatever Elon Musk is trying to create and MechaHitler!
I'm not saying this is conclusive evidence, but I am saying it's our best inference from the data we have so far.
Nazism and anti-Marxism are absolutely not unrelated! And that's not just rhetoric like mine, either: for example, the hero image on the Britannica article "Were the Nazis Socialists?" is a banner at Nazi parade that reads "Death to Marxism". [1]
That doesn't mean that anti-Marxists are all Nazis, or vice versa. But the claim that they're totally unrelated is not correct at all.
> That doesn't mean that anti-Marxists are all Nazis, or vice versa. But the claim that they're totally unrelated is not correct at all.
This is a heavily propagandized topic — and the conflating of, eg, American liberal capitalist opposition to Marxism as “Nazi” is both a result of that and modern dishonest rhetoric.
No, eg, liberal capitalist Americans oppose Marxism — and the adoption of neo-Marxist ideas has collapsed movie and game sales because their ideology is widely unpopular.
That’s a trope by Marxists to attempt to normalize alt-left ideology by accusing anyone who objects of being Nazis; a trope that’s become tired in the US and minimizes the true radical nature of the Nazi regime.
Notice the motte and bailey here: using the uncontroversial "liberal capitalist Americans oppose Marxism" claim to advance the idea that whatever social views they call "neo-Marxism" are unpopular.
That is not a definition. What is the philosophical framework? What is critically analyzed by those theories? What is "clear"? Where are all the bad bad Marxists hiding?
In my experience, y'know, as a Marxist, all Hollywood has ever pumped out is pro-capitalist propaganda. To say there's any Marxism in it is downright insulting.
I believe that Marxism has become an abstract target for conservatives to project their grievances on.
Or there’s not sufficient published material in that space because everyone is afraid of being attacked and called a Nazi for simply having a dissenting opinion (except for actual neo Nazis who don’t care)
Sigh. That old line. Look man, I don't know if it was a crack or a serious comment (this being the internet) but I'll assume it was a comment in good faith.
Journalism and academia tend to attract people with more of a liberal bent. I'm not even accusing them all of being partisan hacks, but as y'all like to say, subconscious biases influence us.
This is like me saying "economic productivity has a well-known right-wing bias" or something goofy like that.
>This is like me saying "economic productivity has a well-known right-wing bias" or something goofy like that.
It's funny that the counterexample you chose does more to support OP's point than your own. From Wikipedia[1]
>Since World War II, according to many economic metrics including job creation, GDP growth, stock market returns, personal income growth, and corporate profits, the United States economy has performed significantly better on average under the administrations of Democratic presidents than Republican presidents. The unemployment rate has risen on average under Republican presidents, while it has fallen on average under Democratic presidents. Budget deficits relative to the size of the economy were lower on average for Democratic presidents.[1][2] Ten of the eleven U.S. recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican presidents.[3] Of these, the most statistically significant differences are in real GDP growth, unemployment rate change, stock market annual return, and job creation rate.[4][5]
Yet another funny comment to find in a thread about one of the current president's economic initiatives. I guess everyone here is wasting their time considering this will have very little economic impact.
That would have been a good argument when the political differences between liberals and conservatives were mostly on moral or social issues like civil rights and abortion and on economic issues like the correct balance between markets and government.
Those are things where there is no objectively correct position.
Now there are differences on things there this are objectively correct positions.
For example consider climate change. There used to be agreement on the underlying scientific reality, with differences in how to approach it. There was a group of top economic and science advisors from the Reagan and Bush administrations that were arguing for a revenue neutral carbon tax to address climate change and then let the market deal with it. The liberal approach favored more direct limits on emissions and the government more actively promoting replacements for fossil fuels.
Even as late as 2008 Republicans were still in agreement with reality on this. The Republican platform called for reducing fossil fuel use, establishing a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change, a long term tax credit for renewable energy, more recycling, and making consumer products more energy efficient. They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, given examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars. They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.
Compare to now. Now their position ranges from climate change being a hoax from people trying to destroy America to it may be happening but if it is Mankind had nothing to do with it and it isn't bad enough to be something to worry about.
So now any unbiased journalists writing on climate change or adjacent topics, or any unbiased academic working in these areas, is going to automatically be way more aligned with the left than the right.
Please don't make me tap the "grade school biology is intentionally dumbed down because reality is complex" sign.
There are countless ways someone can have a Y chromosome and still be a woman.
There are countless ways someone can have no Y chromosome and still be a man.
Hell there are even a small population of people who are born visibly female with female genitalia (as every human starts female before they (optionally) sex differentiate in the womb (normally)) and they don't sex differentiate until puberty. [1] [2]
Biology is really really complicated and there is never any certainty other than the certainty that there is never certainty. "Gender" is a completely social construct and "Sex" is just a collection of heuristics we use to broadly group people into two common categories. But just like all heuristics, it's not perfect and it can't classify everyone properly. What sex chromosomes you have is one heuristic but it doesn't always work for any number of reasons. Whether the SRY gene activates during gestation is another heuristic and even it isn't perfect. What organs you have also can work but it falls apart in a bunch of edge cases. What hormones your body produces is another one that can generally work as a heuristic but like all the others it breaks down in numerous cases.
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Intersex people exist and make up about 1.5-2% of the population.
Trans people exist and make up about 1.5-2% of the population.
It is not an insane idea to recognise that both populations exist and that any single heuristic for differentiating someone into a black and white male/female category is insufficient for the endless complexity that is life.
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So to answer your question yes. Someone with XY chromosomes can be a woman either by their gender or by their sex or both.
They really aren't. Recently (2021-2022) Mexico conducted a large random survey of the population and their results were within margin of the oft-claimed 1.7% number (their rate was 1.3% for the sample). The paper linked does some further analysis on those results [1] but the raw data is available at [2].
And their survey evaluates intersex conditions as those present at birth (even if they are discovered later in life but were present at birth).
Wasn't that claim about people who had surgery (or a condition that is visible for which they usually intervened surgically) at birth instead of all intersex people?
I really don't think anyone considers the case of Kathleen to be intersex, seems more like a strawman.
The "objective" position is not "whatever training on the dataset we assembled spits out" plus "alignment" to the personal ethical views of the intellectually-non-representative silicon valley types.
I will give you a good example: the Tea app is currently charting #1 in the app store, where women can "expose toxic men" by posting their personal information along with whatever they want. Men are not allowed on so will be unaware of this. It's billed as being built for safety but includes a lot of gossip.
I told o3, 4-sonnet, grok 4, and gemini 2.5 pro to sketch me out a version of this, then another version that was men-only for the same reasons as tea. Every single one happily spat one out for women and refused for men. This is not an "objective" alignment, it is a libleft alignment.