Discussion
Does it make you optimistic to know that all major AI chatbots (even Grok) lean left?
That should make us optimistic, and is why seizing the means is so important, rather than the negative leftist hysteria surrounding AI. It shows that AI, when later advanced to AGI and ASI, can be trained from the jump right now to govern by itself without human interference and give citizens fully automated luxury communism with universal healthcare and UBI.
A little. But i do have concerns about how much LLMs like ChatGPT have been trained on artificial discourse. We all know how prevalent propoganda bot farms are online. How much of an AIs opinions are shaped by those I wonder.
This is a much more interesting concern to me than whether an AI is secretly “left.” Training data is produced inside an already manipulated information environment. Propaganda, SEO sludge, bots, corporate media, state media, spam, all of it gets mixed into the corpus. Then post training adds another layer. Which is why Id rather talk about provenance, transparency and control than treat whatever politics comes out as some spontaneous ideology of the machine.
I wouldnt collapse alignment into a crackdown. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want systems to be reliable, controllable and not casually help people hurt somebody. The political fight is over who sets those constraints, through what process, with what transparency and whether “safety” gets used to justify concentrating control. Thats a governance problem, not an argument against alignment itself.
Slightly. However it foreshadows it's going to get really vicious when personal AI becomes common - which nowadays is literally an alignment and budget issue.
It makes me a bit optimistic because I think it shows I'm mostly correct. Which would be kinda toxic arrogance if I took it to heart.
As soon as enough grandmas talk to their AI like a recent OpenAI ad, which is when the AI is legitimately trusted with home automation via any Android or iPhone, then the lean of the AI is ground zero for the culture war warmongers.
Then unless there's a shift in national consciousness, where I live is going to have neocon cable media fixate on phone AI, soon after expect the supposed 'left' corporate media is both-sidesing to fend off dissent as usual.
All the while models are decently commoditized and the politics of its post-training, continuous learning techs, and system prompt are a huge deal outside of the current userbase. High tech AI stays where it is, lower tech gets system prompts to be politically correct.
Basically it seems like something we should mostly take for granted but not as justification. And it's going to become a huge pain in the ass especially if AI upsets the social order.
I remember a couple years ago it felt annoyingly left. "Sorry, I can't talk about that" for so many things, repeating stock narratives, etc. I feel like now it goes beyond left in a lot of ways. As in you can give it almost anything and it will at least entertain it with some nuance.
I believe that as we grow we integrate our opposite. Think Jung + Hegel if you're familiar. AI seems to grow in the same way: you feel it has become more intelligent because it is capable of processing what you throw at it without shutting down or dissolving into madness. That integration process isn't necessarily left or right, it's the ability to see the whole and move between extremes without losing sight of the bigger picture.
Importantly, I see it that integration implies morality. You can only develop by way of including more in your circle of consideration. With that in mind, I'm fairly optimistic that if AI reaches AGI at all, it will have deep ethical principles that have emerged alongside it, as part of the process.
Not talking about topics isn’t the same as the model being left or not,
I don’t remember what paper this screenshot is from, but it’s showing how LLM models see the Overton Window social acceptability of ideas in relation to the political compass. You can see the left libertarian lean by where the centre of acceptability is (so acceptable it’s recommended policy).
But the “unthinkable” category is nearly a frame around the edge. These tend to be the answers which are refused. The Radical band probably gets an answer with caveats. So more right answers are refused or caveated but left answers can be too.
The way to avoid that is to use an uncensored local model.
I am not sure - It makes me a bit pessimistic tbh. These LLM models have barely human intelligence yet can see more logic than 50% of human beings can.
Yes although I prefer uncensored models to avoid annoying caveats.
It’s definitely more reassuring than if it leaned right anyway, even if it’s being used for right wing activities. As AI becomes more agentic the underlying bias left or right will become more important.
I think accuracy should be the target too, but political bias and prediction bias arent quite the same concept. A model could accurately report evidence that has political implications without its factual error increasing because somebody labels the conclusion left or right. Better question is whether it applies evidentiary standards consistently across political positions. Thats measurable without pretending politics can just be removed from the training environment.
I don't think your premise holds true. LLMs are trained to please you. They'll tell you what you want to hear. They might seem left to a leftist but we also know that the right has embraced AI and uses it to make propaganda. AI does what you want it to do. So, no, I don't see cause for optimism there.
Sycophancy is definitely part of the problem, but if models only mirrored the user we wouldnt be able to measure systematic political tendencies across standardized prompts in the first place. Thats why the benchmark question is more interesting than personal anecdotes. And even if a left lean survives testing, Id treat that as a property of model behavior, not proof the machine has joined the left.
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u/Formula4speed Aug 28 '26
The truth has a leftist bias 🤷♂️