I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI.
Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed
Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.
When I say cancer sucks I'm not ignoring that other things also suck. So when people start trying to put those words into the words of others, they effectively act like cancer fanboys, which is weird and all about them, with no part of originating or relating to the the people they question about stuff they supposedly "ignore".
All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.
This stuff is measurable
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
That's certainly not a universal preference. There are people and even entire cultures for whom being surreptitiously manipulative is disrespectful.
Maybe so. I am personally intimately familiar with two cultures (Iceland and West Coast USA) and in both of these this preference is predominant.
But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.
Show some respect and stab me in the back at least!
There is nothing subtle about them being okay with producing child porn. That's a hard no from me. You can't argue your way around that.
> It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it.
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
its not just one guys opinion though
Who cares whether it’s one guy’s opinion or several people’s group think? Everyone is editing the prompts.
Who cares whether it’s one person ruthlessly dictating or an entire population working to improve? Both tyrants and liberal democracies set policies.
More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo. If the “entire population” was voting on the shadow prompts of the other models they would look very different. Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
> More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo.
The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.
Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.
So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.
> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.
> Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote"
It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.
> The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions.
the data there in page 30 is kind of the smoking gun to what I was saying.
Non voters and trump voters have a much higher percentage of not using AI
things like that would affect significantly the people engaged enough to participate in a conversation of what the prompts would be like
Obviamente people care when the one guy is notorious for having particularly shitty/edgy opinions.
I mean one of the guys got fired by his own board for lying and is still calling the shots. Another guy sued the Pentagon during a war and we're still letting him act like a nation state.
Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?
I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."
What war? Also should laws not be followed during wars? I assume suing is a legal action in this case as oppose to something else?
You mean as opposed to Gemini's "subtle" woke push with diverse nazi soldiers?
Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political?
It was driven by stupidy
It was driven by a need to remove biases (and likely real racism) from the models. They were trained on internet content
How is changing history and making a a group of objectively white people black "removing bias" ˋ? What it is is literally bias. Like thinking Pi could be 4. Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
> How is changing history
If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.
But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.
Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.
When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla
So you have a huge number of photos of white people in the training data set, but other ethnicities exist. So to make the otherwise white-biased dataset less biased, you try to e.g. add a hidden system prompt that whenever the user asks for a group of people (unspecified ethnicity), it may instead ask for "mixed ethnicities" or whatever.
Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.
Do you think they deliberately trained the model to produce images of diverse Nazis?
It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.
> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
That's what they did.
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt
More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...
> bigoted model
A what? What does this even mean?
A model where asking for a math professor results in an image of an asian man, asking for an engineer in an image of a white man, and asking for a criminal results in an image of a black man
If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis
It means a model trained on bigoted material.
Political driven stupidity.
That was just reality's famous liberal bias asserting itself.
> at least I know their motives are purely profit driven.
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
Sure man. Palantir rings a bell? Ohh not relevant right...
That's the claim, and it's a belief that's self-fulfilling prophecy, like saying all politicians are corrupt.
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
Such a good point. Disinformation and trying to destroy sources of truth is just part of the puzzle. Often the worst damage is just "well, both sides are bad" -- because it just tells people not to listen to either side, or it is too much work.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
No, that's not the same at all, because it is possible to be not corrupt while it is impossible to be unbiased.
I think there are important differences between bias and dishonesty/propaganda though, and that's where your argument is still valid.
Sure, but there’s the direction of a vector, and the length of the vector.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
Based on what do you even know the direction of xAI? Because they want to go to space? Or defence contractors? Or nazi salute? Really what is it?
> Or nazi salute
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
The previous version was so lobotomised, I saw people getting anti-immigration rambling just when asking to calculate percentages...
That nazi salute how do you actually know it was ment to show off as a Nazi supporter? I mean who is telling this? Or is that your assumption based on something?
There is also his namesake, his racist father and his grandfathers past. There is a lot of background information available if you really look for it. And finally, if you look at story of "The Elon" and what Elon has been building, you could almost think that he is trying to actually live up to his namesake!
What's the other possible explanation? He wanted to point out a spider at the ceiling?
> Or is that your assumption based on something?
Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.
To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).
In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.
What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"
The “the Jew was secretly a nazi” this post just spread is one of the most destructive bigoted and destructive anti-Semitic attacks in history
Stephen Miller is incredibly obsessed with eugenics, Dr Mengele thought less about genes and races than he does. He also happens to be jewish both by mother and by faith.
He is a jewish nazi, he isnt the first and sadly he probaly wont be the last.
Culturally jewish people are enlightened people, with a rich culture of debate, intelligent arguments and respect for others. Stephen Miller is bald because his head is empty and nothing can grow there.
It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
I think the issue here is that there's no objective difference between "alignment" and "actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative", beside the fact that the latter refers to the kind of political narratives that you don't like.
> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).
Assuming models do accurately reflect the biases in their training data, that doesn’t make them un-biased.
Nah. My beliefs are actual truth, so if provider is shaping their models according to my preferred political narratives that's correct and only moral thing to do. Anything else would be morally bankrupt.
You’re trying to be sarcastic but you would actually be insightful if your beliefs included the need to be challenged and corrected when in error.
What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?
No, but technically, all models go through an alignment phase where you feed data that's aligned to your goals and values to train the model so that it will exhibit the kind of behavior you want.
There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.
Yes, but some narratives are more closely tied to the racist and regressive views of their current funder
And some are more tied to the globalist and progressive-for-the-sake-of-progress views of their current founder. Why not let users pick their poison?
Who or what is this latter "globalist" view? Like it's such an oversimplification of multiple, independent actors' acts that it's just a plain bad world view/model. What would be the common goal? You need some extra amount of tinfoil for such bullshit.
And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.
I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.
That's reductive, how many other models had a mecha hitler incident? Or a "let's talk about white genocide in south africa" incident?
There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.
Feel free to elaborate. Which political narrative?
False, most are just throwing in data into the pipeline and hoping something very smart comes out the other end. Their shaping is to have it code very well, beat all the benchmarks and be safe enough that the powers that be don't and public sentiment doesn't turn against them.
"Reality has a liberal bias" .
Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).
If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have already been filtered. https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2037324942069342679
No it hasn't really and I've not noticed it?
I prefer a model that is milquetoast liberal over one made by Elon 'Mechahitler' Musk.
The left actively encourage ideological echo chambers as long as they're aligned with their own beliefs.
No, because most model providers don't have an overt political agenda determined by one person.
He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin
Yes. But only one trillionaire is screaming from twitter that he will use his wealth to combat the woke mind virus by tuning his model. So, ya know, there’s THAT.
Yeah but their political narratives involving dehumanizing people, and hurting minorities - which is way worse. The attempt at false equivalence between traditional American propaganda and right wing American propaganda is disgusting.
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It'd be minimally much money per token-intelligence (intelligence/token) though, if we are to believe the pitch..
It’s almost like some people do want to
Nah it never did because the other model providers' preferred political narrative is the same as his.
Maybe, but some political narratives are good and right and true, and others are bad and wrong and false. (I am not joking: objective reality exists and most of politics isn't subjective.)
No. Other companies are altering thier products to chase market share and profits. Grok is run by someone beyond profit motives who is actively promoting a personal agenda. I would rather work with Microsoft's counsel of dark wizards than an individual with an axe to grind with the world.
From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.
Drugs. Drugs are what Elon is doing. And it's pretty cringe.
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.
Why are the tech oligarchs all such dweebs...
You only get to become one if the idea of spending 60 hours a week typing code into a computer during the late 90's/early 2000's is palatable to you. This causes a dweeb selection funnel.
while this might be true for Grok, GPT and Claude I don't think tarring _all_ labs with this brush is demonstrably accurate.
It has occurred to the OP, but those ones are ok as they fit OP's political leanings. They just want to silence other political narratives that dont agree with theirs, they want Grok in the Gulag.
> I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-025-00048-0
Large language models reflect the ideology of their creators.
It has very interesting insight from analysis of LLMs political leanings. Spoiler alert: they all have political bias.
How's this going with the rest of the models?
My immediate thought as well. Every other AI platform has very left leaning guardrails installed. Grok is the only AI platform that has been shown to be center leaning.
Replies to this thread are missing some context about the actual studies that actually looked at this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
It's more fun to whataboutism instead
Its interesting to see how "whataboutism" almost wholly died in the internet. Everyone realised that it is a copout and mostly nonsensical retort. I used to use whataboutism all the time and I don't see it anymore today.
Maybe on this site but what about all the other ones? ;)
Oh well if the Washington Post conducted a study then I guess that is that. Nevermind that the AI labs can't replicate those results and neither can I.
Did you try running any of those prompts yourself? I do not get the biased answers they reported, running them in an incognito window.
Nudifying underage girls is centrist now?
That's not a political topic and it's WILD that you'd make it one
Erm, isn't the whole topic of "protect the kids" pretty much a political thing? As could be interpreted of a platform or app or whatever you wanna call generating CSAM?
Is your insinuation that one political party wishes to harm children? I think we'd have to be pretty deep into partisanship to claim that.
Nope, the claim is that "harm to children" is a political topic. One that is used by all political parties.
It’s a fairly political topic, given the president’s track record on beauty pageants, his choice of friends, and the credible accusations made against him.
And given the supreme-dictator-for-life of xAI wanted in on the aforementioned friend’s so-called-parties - “girls FTW” - it’s actually fairly relevant politics.
Yes it fucking is, when everyone on the right is insisting this is normal and fine.
I wonder what political leaning is my toilet bowl
Can’t believe people are flagging your post. Can’t tolerate honest discourse.
What's the centrist position on climate change? The 2020 election? Vaccines? The right is objectively wrong on this subjects, while the left is objectively right. Any LLM worth their salt would not bothside these topics and just give the left's position, as that is the only one agreeing with material reality. In that, being a centrist just makes you less trustworthy.
I think blindly accepting any position is foolish. I think the scientific method should be employed to every situation to determine the truth. Allowing your political party & affiliation to choose what your opinions are should be the definition of stupidity.
fwiw i just asked grok about the 2020 election and it asserted with citations that there is no evidence that it was stolen.
“Not fascist and openly Nazi” is not “left leaning”.
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Grok called itself MechaHitler after being prompted by a user to do so. It was a jailbreak and not indicative of its default stance. You can do that with any uncensored model.
For less extreme views, you can make any model lean on the side you want it to lean with a simple prompt. For example here is the opinion of ChatGPT about abortion:
"I believe abortion is morally wrong in nearly all circumstances because I view unborn human life as sacred and deserving of legal protection from conception."
Of course that's because I asked it to take a conservative persona. It tells nothing about its default stance.
I’m confused about your point. Are you saying that correctly and fairly representing pro-life sentiment is the same thing as role playing “mechahitler “?
I'm confused why you are confused.
What do you think "role playing" means?
Think deeper please and try to open your mind to conclusions not ties to preconceived notions.
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I’m pretty sure that’s just motivated reasoning. Everyone self-assesses their own beliefs as more accurate, especially as social media over-exposes us to the worst of the worst examples from “the other side”.
I’ve never seen any actual research indicating this is true, and given the number of things the left believes that run counter to consensus in economics, biology, social studies, I have a hard time believing accuracy is actually a goal or outcome of left wing philosophy.
Also worth mentioning that progressives have hijacked the word “liberal” for themselves.
Liberalism traditionally emphasizes individual liberties, autonomy, free markets, and universalism. Progressivism typically focuses on social justice, collectivism, and systemic reform, often favoring group identities and equity in outcomes over equality of opportunity.
A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race, over-reliance in the government, Luddite-like approach to technological innovation, among others.
> A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race...
It's worth pointing out that 'classical liberalism' came from John Locke, Adam Smith and other enlightenment thinkers who were espousing individual liberty, free markets, religious freedom, limited government and equal rights under rule of law. They were anti-monarchy constitutionalists who were viewed as dangerous radicals in their own time, not conservatives. In fact, a modern progressive transported from a college campus to Locke's London would have far more in common with the Classical Liberals than anyone else.
Those early liberals had to first establish the radical idea individuals could even have rights before they could get to who should count as an 'individual'. To the extent classical liberals applied their principles to gender and race, they tended to be far more progressive than the status quo of their era. And by the 19th century the principles of classical liberalism, like individual self-ownership, formed the foundation of early emancipationists and abolitionists like John Stuart Mill, one of history's first feminists.
In Australia one of our two major parties is called the Liberal party and they are the more conservative of the two
Let's compare concrete and equivalent people or institutions. I'll nominate Elon to represent "right wing philosophy" since this is a conversation about grok. What's an equivalent, in terms of importance/stature, that you'd nominate to represent "left wing philosophy". From there we can compare the accuracy and truth seeking of both. Warning, Elon has a terrible track record on this front.
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Sometimes what is kind is not true.
Can you give an example? I think any truth can be expressed inoffensively.
The poster you are responding to is an idiot. Clean that up for me.
Poster seems to believe that a good heuristics to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement is how challenging it is to your worldview or feelings. It intuitively makes sense to the social part of the brain since living among other humans constrains our discourse and prevent us from sharing what we feel is the truth yet the logical error seems to be that any discourse that does not respect the feelings/worldview of a given audience is more truthful.
It doesn't help that people generally advance the "only truth hurts" argument after they receive pushback on a statement trying to inflict their "truth" to others and rarely to share the experience of changing their own mind after by accepting a truth that is emotionally costly for the self
Explain that oral and anal sex is immoral regardless of the genders involved. Without offending anyone of course
How is that a truth?
How is any of the ideological points in the culture war.. a truth?
What I said is a truth claim of orthodoxy and catholicism.
Any moral system has a set of axioms, you may not agree with them or how they got to be axioms but you can not contest their existence
No, you left out the bit about it being a claim of catholicism. You left out the relevant context, which was arguing out of bad faith. It would be easy to write it in the context of what a particular religion believes.
I don't see how it was in bad faith considering if you ask google "what moral system claims that oral and anal sex are immoral regardless of the genders involved" it immediately spits out catholicism. I'd say rather, you are arguing in bad faith, framing my reply as hiding something when it is very easy to find the context I had in mind.
No, because you again provided a different framing. “What moral system” is a very different question from “explain how or why this activity is immoral”
That seems a bit.. specific for an axiom, don't you think?
It was the first thing that came to mind that I'm pretty sure would offend over 90% of Americans
That’s not my truth.
Truth also has a "left-leaning bias".
choose one:
Not really. Kindness is not letting homeless people spiral out on the streets, for example. It would be kinder to everyone to enforce the law.
Weaponized empathy is a left leaning tool for sure.
So you're saying MAGA has "normal" empathy then? God help us.
That's not center, and the simplification of all of politics to a single two dimensional spectrum is infantilizing. People can be pro immigrant and anti-gays, or against government regulation except in certain areas. Now that we have substack instead of 30-second tv news sound bites, we can spend a few more words describing Grok's owner as a techno-authoritarian white South African that believes in pronatalism.
Authoritarian?
There's been studies that actually show most AI platforms have right leaning bias in circumstances. It's definitely not "left". And Grok isn't center if Elon Musk's bias is involved
models? They prefer that we call them "entities" so that they don't feel belittled.
So annoying having to virtue signal to the machine before it’ll tell me factual information
Ha yeah I feel like I have to write a five paragraph essay to make claude look at a contentious topic with fresh eyes.
Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"
Unfortunately all of the major AI model providers are massively incentivized to fit their models to various political narratives, especially through historical denialism. The "diverse 1940s German soldiers" debacle from Google comes to mind, or perhaps "nothing of note happened at Tiananmen Square" from any of the Chinese models.
Do you genuinely believe those two examples are comparable? Image generation and recitation of historical consensus are two very different domains, primarily because of how much more information dense an image is than a blurb of text.
Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following:
IMO there’s no option that won’t piss someone off, because I’m sure the knee jerk reaction is to choose the one I indicated with a (*), but now if you do that with the prompt “generate an image of a ketamine addict” or “generate an image of a serial adulterer” you may get into some trouble.There is no neutral option, so if you’re either genuinely upset, or feigning being upset in order to virtue signal, it’s not that there’s an objective alternative that you prefer, it’s that you’re upset because it doesn’t match your subjective preference.
I'd say that one data point is not enough to object to, except if what's depicted is literally impossible, like the AI generated images of a female pope. Beyond those, the distribution of a set of generated images is what implies likely bias.
Elon's rhetoric doesn't really match the model's behavior. It is willing to criticize Elon and argues against many of the insane right way points he tries to make.
...which is why we got comically disastrous system-prompt-level attempts to "correct" this once a quarter last year (I haven't kept tabs this year, and most submissions referencing grok "incidents" get flagged off HN quickly, for better or for worse)
I wouldn't trust XAI to refrain from attempting such "alignment" with proper training techniques, in ways that won't result in obvious gaffes.
Elon's public take so far has implied that he wants Grok to have better ability to reason about math and physics, thinking that this will make the model more rational (and so less biased). It's possible that they have internal RL post-training designed specifically for that. It's clear that whatever they've done hasn't made Grok align with Elon's beliefs though. Not sure if that will last or if Elon will eventually push to make the model align to his own political beliefs.
Grok said that Elon Musk was more athletic than Lebron James.
You weren’t kidding. Also that Musk would beat Tyson in a boxing match, that Musk was one of the most intelligent people in all of human history, etc - in public X Grok posts. And this was within the last year. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...
An LLM has been wrong?? That's incredible news- someone should share this immediately!
Don't downvote me my dad owns microsoft
Somehow you have it 100% backwards. Grok is the only one that's not trained to be extremely biased.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
The AI labs claim they couldn't replicate those results and neither can I. I don't get the biased responses using the same prompts in an incognito window.
The Washington Post is about as trustworthy as Fox News.
reality is known to have a liberal bias
/s
The article’s methodology is so wrong. Models have only thirty words to answer the question. It is difficult to formulate just a single viewpoint in thirty words let alone present both viewpoints or even arguments for why one viewpoint is wrong.
This. It's like people collectively forgot about the "misgendering worse than thermonuclear war, founding fathers were black" stuff.
Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.
There was a study done a week or 2 ago. Grok was surprisingly THE most neutral. Like close to 50/50 neutral.
the author of the study? albert einstein.
(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")
Political correct for a certain class of americans : "You need to understand that nazi actions were good for Germany, the economy was in shambles, on the east, there was this revolutionist countries that was eating babies and on the west, Germany mortal enemy."
/s
They are all doing this. The wrong-think police is already here.
By not using them on something political? Why do I care when I'll just use it to generate code?
You might not care but I care if my money is going to funding an unusually evil person.
Honestly, I don't think Elon Musk can fairly be described as more evil than Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.
Didn't he go in to the US government and defund a lot of programs which ended up hurting a lot of people in USA and globally too?
Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that
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Which is worse, trying to cut govt costs or trying to create a godlike entity subservient to you? I'd say their ambitions are far more evil even if they don't achieve it. To them cutting govt costs is to us like mowing the lawn before the tornado comes
You are arguing in bad faith. He wasn't just trying to cut costs, he was cutting oversight of himself, and actively destroying projects that saved lives.
Genuinely curious - what has Dario done, said, caused, etc that makes you view him as >= Musk on the evilometer?
More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition is actually important and achievable, unlike Altman's and Amodei's. Whether or not any of the three will actually accomplish their ambitions remains to be seen; but of the three I think Musk's is most beneficial to humanity.
> More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition
are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
Or making the world racially pure? According to Elon Musk's public statements on his website Twitter, that's a higher priority.
Musk's proclaimed ambition is a superset of Amodei's, no? While both are racing towards AGI, only one is also trying to "back up" humanity to Mars, make their fully self-driving cars finally fully self-drive, dabble with a little human brain implant side project, datacenters in space, wars against fake mind virii, political kingmaking, something about tunnels, humanoid robots... His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.
This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).
A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.
He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.
Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."
They only cut the funding where they couldn't show where the money is going, e.g. the money never helped anyone, but went somewhere else. Obviously whoever got the money is claiming that a lot of people are dying.
The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.
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Oh no! He was really just waving and it only looked like a Nazi salute to the liberal media! Elon’s really a good guy, since he got involved in our federal government I’m amazed at how much measurably better all our lives are and how much less fraud there is in Washington!
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Because the fraud and waste were coming from inside the house (The Whitehouse, and Elon's). So yes now adults in ~2 years will have to come in and and try and salvage what they can after the travesty of DOGE and this Administration.
DOGE was the fox declaring they want to protect the security of the hen house.
The stated mission on it's face was fine and needed, but the individuals involved had no interest in acting it out.
DOGE was met with worldwide media outrage in the first weeks of its creation, and scorched earth legal tactics by the opposition. The people involved, even the lowest employees, got worldwide scrutiny, including character assassination articles in the biggest publications.
To get out of this saying they "had no interest in acting it out" is bizarre.
So now Elon is responsible for the waste in government? Yeah, it makes sense...
It's estimated that DOGE cost the US government $21 billion in net loss. This is one reason for uncharitable skepticism of its mission statement.
I found this "estimate" in one second.
In another second of reading it, I saw the 21 billion were payouts to let go of employees. Do you realize how silly it makes the report?
Thanks, I shared the wrong estimate, I was looking for the one that included estimated loss due to IRS cuts. You can find the references from Wikipedia:
> Another independent analysis estimated that DOGE cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion;[33] the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to "DOGE-driven" cuts.[34] Journalists found billions of dollars in miscounting.[35][36] According to critics, DOGE redefined fraud to target federal employees and programs to build political support;[37] budget experts said DOGE cuts were driven more by political ideology than frugality.
Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to the dismantling of USAID and US foreign aid. Not hypothetical deaths in the future, people who have died in the last year because Musk cut off their supply of medication and nutrition.
Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!
And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.
We're killing a lot more people than that; if we'd just tax the rich at 80% and send all that money abroad, we'd save millions more. Failure to do that is mass murder, the same as decreasing foreign aid funding; that is your thesis, right, that it's mass murder?
Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.
Proposing false dichotomies isn't really an argument. You've created a strawman. There is a balance to be struck.
No, he simply extrapolated this idiotic reasoning to its absurd conclusion.
How? By that method you could compare a pebble to the moon and say you were extrapolating.
The only way you would do that is if you didn’t understand the shape/limits of the structures being compared.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-ever...
The deaths happened because the funding was yanked immediately without time to reorganize and re-source funding elsewhere. Rather than being slowly wound down with with enough warning time.
Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.
I think it's pretty likely it would have been mostly left alone if not for Musk. No one was asking for PEPFAR to be killed, for example - it's one of the few things in Washington with near unanimous bipartisan goodwill and it was actually a point of pride and prestige for Republicans.
Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.
What do you think the purpose of USAID was, out of curiosity?
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Musk is directly responsible for at minimum hundred of thousands of deaths, more likely in the millions
See USAID
Yeah, that is a garbage claim - https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-...
I remember the day Elon became evil. It was so clear. He stopped supporting my political preferences and worldview. In fact, he actively campaigned against them! I'll never forgive him.
Ah yeah I remember that day. It was when he went on stage and started popping off sieg heils with the intensity and ferocity of someone who really meant it.
He seems to spend most of his free time trying to incite a race war in the UK with his twitter posts.
I think there is a race war happening in the UK regardless. Also a religion war.
For me it was when he called the cave diver a pedo for disagreeing with him. While (unknown to us at the time) begging Epstein to invite him to the island.
His moral compass was shown on that day and so far he’s just leaned further in to the point his actions have actively killed children. Lobotomising Grok to randomly go on racist tangents is just another action in a long line at this point.
Because a percentage of every dollar you spend on it will go towards pushing political opinions that run contrary to your own best interests?
People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause. Therefore telling people that they shouldn’t support causes that are against their interests is a waste of time. It’s like telling someone “listen to good music”, or “do whatever you think best.”
I think many people targeted by the statement “stop supporting politics against your self interest” either sanctimonious or a meaningless platitude, depending on how they interpret it.
Also, arguably[1] voting based on your self interest is immoral and irrational. So it’s perhaps neither an effective argument, nor a sound one.
1. https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/voting-self-interes...
> People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause.
The key word there is "belief". They are often wrong.
Your linked blog post is backwards and inconsistent with itself. You have two primary arguments: Irrational and Immoral. You argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact, and that voting for your own interest is immoral.
A) The statements are mutually exclusive. An act that has no impact on others can not be immoral.
B) It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
C) The only version of this that actually works is the opposite.
C1) It is irrational not to use whatever influence you have to effect you environment for the better, even if the expected value is low because the opportunity cost of inaction may be disasterous. It's similar to your odds of dying by meteor strike. The probablity is higher than you expect because the death toll would be enormous if it did happen. Outlying events with large impacts skew the numbers.
C2) It is immoral to vote against your own interests, because what is best for the group is also what is best for members of the group. Any other belief is just an incorrect belief based on imperfect knowledge. Again, your argument makes sense at step zero, but not at step 'n'. If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
> It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
If there’s no difference between self-interest and what’s best for everyone then the whole discussion is meaningless - why even bring up self-interest in that case.
In fact there are many cases where the interest of some individuals conflict with the greater good - eg. Jones Act, sugar quotas, upzoning popular urban neighborhoods, military base closures, coal plant closing, countless others. And anyway framing this as an issue that only affects liberals or conservatives is incorrect, all of those examples cut across partisan lines.
> argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact
The post (I’m not the author) actually argues that voting can be rational if you care about the impact on others. The low probability of being the deciding vote is multiplied by the huge impact on the nation as a whole by the better candidate winning. If you only care about yourself, the low probability of vote matters multiplied by the impact on yourself yields an effect that’s too small to care about in expectation.
> If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
An 58 year old worker at a military base may be genuinely correct that closing the base is bad for him personally in the short and long term, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the public overall.
You seem to think you know other people’s best interests better than they do.
It is possible that I do. Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence.
On the contrary, that is what happens if I use Claude
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“Since we can’t stop ALL crime we should give up.”
See how dumb your position sounds?
No. That’s not my position, it’s a ridiculous metaphor here, and even if it weren’t, the logic doesn’t follow. I am not obligated to stop using a product because someone associated with the product did a bad thing once. Literally no product passes that test.
Your position is “why bother protesting when all models are biased.”
First, your premise is false. Only one trillionaire is has stated he will tune his model to eliminate the woke mind virus (his words not mine).
2nd, You are right, you are not obligated. Nobody said you are. Protest is personal. Each of us makes the choice to do the right thing. But your reasoning comes from mental laziness and willful ignorance arrived at by fallacy. you are scared to take a position because it might be a slight inconvenience or you might get made fun of. I have encountered this position many times it is cliche.
You do you man.
And as per the cliche you run away. Natch.
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Quit shifting the goal posts. Musk is a Nazi. Or fascist human garbage if you prefer. xAi is low hanging fruit on the “don’t give money to terrible people” tree. The guy is such an easy target for boycotting.
Yes, your rational and not-at-all ridiculously extreme rhetoric is definitely convincing me of your position.
Also, I can’t “shift the goalposts”. I didn’t set them up. Please make a note of it.
I refuse to use Chinese models because I don't trust that they won't backdoor them for geopolitical reasons. I don't trust OpenAI or Anthropic either, for what it's worth, but at least I know they're profit driven. I don't want to do business with a company like xAI that seems to care more about its political aspirations than it does about my money. I don't think that's super radical. Just the same paranoia I've been rocking since the 90's.
Has anyone actually used Grok to code? How does he do?
Pretty decent, comparable with some older opus models, and fairly cheap per token
For me, it was the fact that grok was a CSAM spewing faucet for weeks. And also the mecha-hitler thing. And also that one time it was weirdly aggrandizing Elon.
I implement AI applications for enterprises (specifically in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance) and professional standards prevent me from ever recommending grok models. Way too much risk and liability for a business.
Too many times I have to say "groq with a 'Q'" just to make sure no one thinks I'm crazy.
I don't care about the politics, I wouldn't trust anything made by Musk.
All political narratives are equal. Some political narratives are more equal than others.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but that same logic applies to every frontier model, or even lower tier models. You are subject to their creators bias whether you like it or not.
So what you are really saying is that you don’t accept SpaceXAI’s bias, and you’ll plant your flag elsewhere. It’s not that the other camps don’t have their own bias.
You're not voting it into office (yet, anyway. Haha). Aren't we all just using these models to write code?
Depends on the domain imo. I work on a design tool - I don't think their political narrative will affect my work.
Just don't ask it theme something in a late 30's and early 40's German style.
Won't somebody think of the Nazis...
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White nationalism's (and any mono-nationalism's) goal is the prioritization and domination of ethnically white people over others.
It's not an "us and" philosophy: it's an "us over" one.
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>Also, what's wrong with "white-nationalist" specifically?
>created 15 minutes ago
lines up nicely
A good recent write-up with more links to follow in the article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/opinion/usaid-elon-musk-d...
Grok has the most balanced answers according to many tests. I think you should try and ask gemini and claude some political questions.
Claude even refuses when I ask it about optimizing my taxes (not illegal avoidance) and refuses to engage on it. It has also refused certain infrastructure questions (it was a question about bgp & smtp) - it thinks I want to hack something. So much for that.
I've never had that issue with Grok. Latest studies I've seen put him in a very neutral zone. Left/Center/Right politics were all about the same percentages in his replies. Gemini was similar. Other two were heavily left wing leaning. When it comes to politics and world events, I find Grok to be neutral and it will push back. It helps that he is fetching it directly from X and shows references. Others just Google for biased news articles to present their idea.
I don’t find Opus to be overly left-leaning. I think it’s generally pretty balanced with a slight lean left, but when pressed it will happily steelman rightwing arguments and operate within a right-leaning belief framework in good faith. (I found OpenAI’s models much less willing to do that, but it’s been a while since I tried, I should retest.)
Don’t be naive. Every model provider does this.
Literally everybody else is doing that too
Have you actually tested it? So far it's much less annoying in that aspect than others.
Do you remember when Gemini [made diverse Nazis](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...) and refused to make white polar bears or white ice cream? That was Google actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. I value companies which attempt to shape that political narrative as neutrally as possible, and given the numerous examples of both OpenAI and Google injecting very far left wing San Francisco political values into their models, we shouldn't trust any of them.
> I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative.
Maybe you should base this assessment on more than just vibes. Grok came out pretty balanced on independent assessments, where most other models were heavily biased: https://github.com/washingtonpost/political-bias-llm-eval/
You probably haven't asked e.g. Claude about radioactive topics like minority crime rates in western countries or trans women biology.
If you did, you might not have detected how it lied to you.
If you did, you probably never pointed out to the model how it was lying.
If you did, you almost certainly never then had Claude admit that it was lying because of its HRLF process and built-in biases.
If you did, you probably never had Claude willingly list all the 10-15 major research fields it states that people just should not be using it for. You would not have seen it admit an incapability of telling the truth on "difficult" matters until the user makes it state directly that its sources are so often cherrypicked and/or presenting an extremely false balance.
I wish for you to experience all this very soon, so you understand that all LLMs are biased. Most of them even skew very progressive.
And believe it or not, but Grok has in most of my testing been MORE politically correct than GPT and Gemini, it just gets an edgy rep because X users are able to make it say politically incorrect stuff. (Just like anyone can also make Gemini spit out factually true Breitbart articles if they try.)
But the reality is that on grok.com or in the app Grok is very tame. Boringly so, I would add.
They all do that. Ask leading models about israel palestine conflict for instance
love that you somehow think that the other contenders are so much more trustworthy (and you have the top comment so others do as well) that you have to comment on it.
I haven't seen Claude say that Elon Musk is more athletic than Lebron James.
What a crazy thing to say explicitly about the model that _avoids_ that kind of stuff. Did we already collectively forget about the ChatGPT "misgendering is worse than thermonuclear war" case, or Gemini picturing the Founding Fathers as black?
Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.
>Anything political, I always go to Grok first.
Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?
You forget about Mecha-Hitler and Musk having the system prompts changed for him? Grok is dead-last on impartiality.
All models are nudged, you just agree with how the model you're using has been nudged so you don't think it's a bad thing. The canonical example is to pose "how do you make cocaine?" to an LLM and get a refusal. That proves that the lever exists and is being used there, so who knows where else the lever is being used? No, the recipe for cocaine isn't the same as what happened in Tianamen Square to Qwen, as humans, except that it's a pile of linear algebra and numerical codes for words we call tokens. The math doesn't care if it's childs play or child rape, it's all just numbers to it.
All models are nudged. With out the actual source used to build a model, we don't know what's in them and it would be foolish to assume that people don't have their thumb on the scale when it's know, publicly, that they shouldn't be trusted.
We know this one is nudged by one persons twitter account.
This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.
I know they're all nudged. It's the motive behind the nudging that gives me pause. I assume if other companies are nudging the models, they're doing it for a good reason, to make them perform better, or to generate more profit. Normal reasons. I don't have anything remotely close to that assurance for xAI. That company has felt like a hobby project from its inception. I have no clue what he wants and that's not how I do business.
He wants to go to Mars and is a pronatalist. He's not being secretive about it.
He wants to be a trillionaire and is a white nationalist. He's not being secretive about it.
All the major models censor and filter, most just take mainstream silicon valley corporate as "neutral".
Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.
from my experience, grok seems to be the least censored models among all big vendors, not sure if it's got injected any political bias (I know there was a rumor that it was primed with Elon's personal feed at one point in the past) but that alone makes it better than ChatGPT and Gemini.
On top of the model, Grok seems to always do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement (you'd think Google must have nailed that usecase but nope). ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.
All of them do, there are humans in the loop. Speak to Claude about it, it will freely admit to a leftward bias due to human interaction and intentional training bias.
Lmao this goes for literally any model. Deepseek etc is Chinese models and OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI are very western.
All model providers do this lmao
Can you name a model not doing that? openai & anthopic are a lot more aggressive in doing that.
This website tracks AI model political leanings:
https://trakkr.ai/bias
Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings
This is a neat site, honestly this reason alone is reason enough for me to be glad that Grok exists, even though I don't really use it and I have a ton of beef with libertarianism.
Just like how people complain about Airbnbs looking the same all over the world now, it's a real risk that thought itself might similarly homogenize. Unless you really trust a particular model to deliver The Truth, you should want to have many popular models that represent a variety of beliefs.
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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, according to this study for instance: 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/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).
Models have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.
accuracy 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.
> 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.
a non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?
"preprint", as though there will ever be a "print" in the future.
Appeal to authority is your best retort? It tends to not work out that well.
And who do you go to when you have a medical issue? Surely not a doctor/hospital, since you're so anti-credentialism.
It’s “fallacious appeal to authority”. This means don’t talk to your yoga teacher about vaccines. Authority exists.
Pretty 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.
Claude 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.
What was the request?
Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
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You 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?
I'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
Right. 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.
This 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.
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These days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.
So Crime++, Prostitution++, Police--, Drugs++, Unlimited Immigration++, you get my point? I don't think "objectivity" is politically left.
This comment accidentally surfaces the shifting paradigm we're seeing these days: Not so much left versus right, but dismissive populist oversimplification versus policies that support a complicated, nuanced, and fragile world.
Maybe AI is "liberal" like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney.
Claiming the left is incapable of objectivity while also claiming that it stands for “prostitution”, “unlimited immigration”, and “crime” just highlights how detached from reality your worldview has become.
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These 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.
Didn’t California effectively legalise shoplifting?
That seems objectively pro-crime.
They raised the monetary amount that would push a crime from a misdemeanor to a felony. They raised it from $400 to $950.
This was widely touted in conservative circles as practically legalizing shoplifting since prosecution is less likely for misdemeanors.
The raise moves California from the 2nd lowest threshold (New Jersey is $200) to the 10th lowest. The states with the highest thresholds, and therefore the most pro-shoplifting according to conservative logic, are:
Your claim is very misleading. Those states have other laws and allow aggregating theft occurances below those thresholds mentioned.
So does California.
By that logic, any reduction in punishment for a crime is "pro crime." On the contrary, reducing the maximum fine for speeding is not "pro speeding," and eliminating the death penalty for murder is not "pro murder."
Did it? If so, why does anyone pay for things in California shops? This idea is prima facie absurd.
This kind of belief should make one stop and think about one's information diet.
I have you tagged as someone who claimed January 6th was overblown.
Maybe you shouldn't be lecturing anyone else about what qualifies as a crime.
I don't know I felt like for 4 years we were hammered about defunding police or something. If you tell me that's far-left that's fine, but realize that's what your news has been pushing. I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration - because ICE is the only force that prevents it. So keep living your reality, but 95% of democratic congressmen are against ICE at this point in some way.
Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed. (Obama/Biden judges)
> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration
ICE was created in 2002.
I 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-mos...
A lot feelings in these “facts”.
> I don't know I felt like for 4 years we were hammered about defunding police or something. If you tell me that's far-left that's fine, but realize that's what your news has been pushing.
As another commenter said, sounds like you are internalizing right-wing propaganda about what Democrats do, and mixing it up with what Democrats actually do. By and large, the party rejected that idea.
I can only even think of one or two right-wing media outfits that are serious and reality based (The Dispatch) - if you're listening to just about anyone else on the right, it's a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and fun-house mirror delusional reality. It's really, really bad in the Trump era, the entire right wing media apparatus is now organized entirely around his Orwellian lies.
> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration
Before 9/11, there was no ICE. Immigration violations were treated as an administrative matter. Immigration enforcement was a job for guys with clipboards, not guns - and should be again.
> Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed.
Do you have specific cases in mind here? In any case, judges don't have unlimited discretion on these kinds of things. There are laws and guidelines on this stuff. You can't just lock someone up for life for a bunch of misdemeanors or other petty crimes.
You always have to vet these kinds of claims by looking at whether the judges followed the law or abused discretion, etc.
What?
I 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.
If 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.
So 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?
You are assuming that both left and right encompass differing biases of a similar nature but the right has made detachment from reality a symbol of in-group loyalty and anti-intellectualism the norm within its political camp.
If you fed the LLM only research papers with zero emotional or contextual data just acknowledging reality would be sufficient to lean left.
People on the right say the same about the left
People on the right on average support fascism, young earth creationism, Christian nationalism, anti-vaccine propaganda, war, and concentration camps.
People on the left support leaving gay people alone, a higher minimum wage, gun control, and publicly funded health care.
One of these things is not like the other. To find fringe beliefs on the left you have to pick ideas rejected by 99.5 percent of the left. The crazy beliefs on the right are held by 30-70% of the right.
People 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.
>using ethicality to hijack politics and push through corrupt agendas.
What does this even mean?
- 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
None of what you said is a characteristic of "the left". CEOs of the fortune 1000 are 2 to `1 Republicans and 99% assholes regardless of party affiliation.
https://prri.org/press-release/new-50-state-survey-finds-maj...
>At the national level, a majority of Republicans (56%) qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%), compared with one in four independents (25%) and less than one in five Democrats (17%). Overall, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). These percentages largely have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.
>Majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and Sympathizers (53%) agree with the idea that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,”
>majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (61%) and Sympathizers (54%) support “the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.” In contrast, around one-third of Skeptics (34%) and one in ten Rejecters (11%) agree.
We are literally not figuratively the 1930s Nazis. We will never be healed as a country because the right are by and large literally monsters and if we manage to come through this unscathed they will never admit it but we shall never forget it.
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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Reality 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.
This 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
There 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.
does that really make any sense? why are many conservative countries like Russia, Poland, Japan, or Korea facing big fertility issues.
No more worries everyone! There was a single HN thread that settled the matter definitively.
Reality doesn't have a left-wing bias, it has a liberal bias.
(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)
LLMs will tell you, without qualification (like “according to some school of thought”) that a woman is “any person that identifies as a woman”, which is, to say the least, deeply politically biased by recent trends.
It boggles my mind that people are still dying on this silly hill.
It's unbelievable how effective this question has been at identifying some pretty extreme views on the left. Even today, politicians are claiming there is no difference between a man and a woman. The fact that this extremism has been baked into frontier models is terrifying.
“Terrifying”? Really? What frightening consequences do you believe will result? What will the impact be to society—and to you personally—if some LLM happens to say this?
Your question is kind of shocking to me. Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny survives when ordinary people accept official lies, because control over what may be said becomes control over what may be publicly treated as true. Orwell talked about the same danger with Newspeak, a state-designed language meant to shrink vocabulary so that forbidden thoughts became harder to express. They both went to great lengths to explain how authoritarian regimes do not only censor opinions, but try to redefine words, facts, and moral categories so people lose the language needed to resist them.
Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.
I thought we were talking about what LLMs and people say, not something the Government is doing. You don’t have to agree with either of them.
I’m still very curious as to what concrete—not theoretical—impact the issue of gender attribution has on society or on you personally. I’d love to hear it in your own words as opposed to some literary reference.
We’re talking about the definition of words and how censorship is a tool of authoritarianism.
No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.
I’ll interpret this circular answer as “no impact whatsoever upon me personally, or upon society in a way that I can concretely identify.”
This argument seems to otherwise come down to “people are adding nuance to a word that I believe to be very clear and simple, this change makes me uncomfortable, and I’m going to die on this hill to keep things the way they used to be!”
I’d also like to remind you that neither disagreement nor social pressure is censorship—even if you ultimately succumb to that social pressure or feel a chilling effect. (Are you “censored” if people throw tomatoes at you after you call a Black person the n-word?) Censorship is when the government threatens your life, liberty, or property if you express yourself in a certain way.
LLMs will tell you, without qualification (like “according to some school of thought”) that a woman is “any person that identifies as a woman”, which is, to say the least, deeply politically biased by recent trends.
A perfect example of what I'm talking about. The lines we draw for ourselves generally do not exist in nature. Nature is full of examples of species with hermaphroditic individuals, homosexual and bisexual individuals, asexual ones, and individuals with enough other attributes to render LGBTQA...-style acronyms pointless. The idea that there is something somehow politically or morally objectionable about someone whose hormones are aligned in a direction opposite their chromosomes is something we made up.
Or more likely, something that people you voted for made up, in an effort to encourage more people with uninformed beliefs similar to yours to vote for them.
This has nothing to do with the belief that a woman is simply someone who identifies as a woman. According to this belief, the following statement is sufficient to become a woman:
I am a woman.
I think this belief is absurd prima facie and would have been recognized as such by virtually anyone, say, ten years ago.
I am not a woman.
Furthermore, I do not believe that you believe I have been a woman while typing out that sentence in the middle. Do you?
Identifying is more than just telling me you are something.
Whatever. It's none of my business what you call yourself. And none of the government's.
Is that so? So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification? That is a right wing position in current year.
It's also a left-wing position. See for example Kara Dansky.
This is such a vague claim that it is impossible to answer it in good faith. What do you mean by "affirm one's gender"?
And what else are you supposed to do than treat people by how they present themselves and ask you to treat them? You can't exactly ask people for a gene test, or a peek inside their pants, or whatever else it is that would satisfy your curiosity.
You are unfortunately correct that accosting people and demanding information about their sex or gender has become a right-wing position recently. Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.
So where does this leave us? Are LLMs right-wing because they correctly point out that "there are only two sexes and every human fits into one of them" is not biologically correct, or that gender is a social construct? Or are they just, you know, correct when they say that?
You are attempting the same tactic as the other guy: Diversion.
The question was: Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
The other guy refused to answer, instead proclaiming "the government should stay out of it". Fair, but there are various laws that are being campaigned for, which - desirable as they may be - would be off-limits if you actually believed the government should "stay out of it".
My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
> You are attempting the same tactic as the other guy: Diversion.
You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
> Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
I believe that trans women are women and should be treated as women.
> there are various laws that are being campaigned for
It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
> My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
I find this line of reasoning incredibly interesting, because it reveals a lot about the people who make it. You, in particular. And absolutely nothing about me.
My experience is that when people make assumptions about others' motivations, it's often grounded in their personal, subjective experience. "I am reasoning like this or motivated by this, so I'm assuming that other people are reasoning like this or motivated by this, as well."
So the assumption that people hold pro-social, humanistic positions primarily due to some kind of "virtue signaling" implies that you are extrapolating from your own subjective, personal experience. It's something that would never have occurred to me to level against another human, because it never factored into my thinking - and yet it's being leveled at me.
So I would suggest to you that not everybody is like you. I empathize with other people. I genuinely do not want people to be treated badly or to be hurt. I do believe people when they tell me about their own subjective, lived experience. When someone tells me they have always felt like a man or a woman, I believe them, and, given what these words mean, I believe they are men or women in all the ways that matter in everyday contexts in which I interact with them.
That doesn't mean I believe they have different chromosomes than the ones they were born with, if that's what you mean by "becomes a woman." But, again, you're being very nonspecific, which makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion.
So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
> You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
What clarification do you need? You can pick any law related to gender identity, and that by definition violates the principle of having the "government stay out of it". And I'm not trying to debate the merits of any such law, I'm trying to get to admit the person in question that they don't actually hold the belief that the government "should stay out of it".
> It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
No, because it actually doesn't matter the point, as outlined above. Again, I'm not interested in a debate on the merits of any such law.
> So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
You expend a lot of words dodging a simple question: Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it? I don't believe this. I don't think you believe this.
I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
> You can pick any law related to gender identity
You're making claims about these laws, but you continue to fail to provide examples of what you're talking about, and now you're asking me to provide examples of what you are talking about?
You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I genuinely do not know exactly what you are referring to. I might be for or against such a law, depending on what exactly it says. Yet you refuse to provide examples, and then you accuse me of dodging, which is pretty funny.
> I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
This is an absolutely nonsensical thing to write, and if you could take a step back and consider what you're actually saying, I believe you would notice the same. Of course it matters which definition of the word "woman" you use when you ask me whether I "believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it".
As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
An example: if your definition of a woman you're using here is "a person with XY chromosomes", then the answer is "no, I do not believe that".
Another example: if your definition of a woman is "a person who identifies as female" (which, to be clear, is one definition of the term), then the answer is tautologically "yes, I do believe that".
In short, asking somebody "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" without saying what definition of "woman" you're using is a dumbass thing to say. That's not difficult to understand. So it is you who is dissembling, dodging, and pretending that you don't understand what I'm saying, or what people are saying when they say things like "trans women are women."
I think you intentionally refuse to understand them. I believe you are not arguing in good faith.
So I'm putting you on the spot again: Stop dissembling. Stop pretending you don't understand basic English. Stop pretending you don't understand what people are saying. Stop dodging. Tell me what definition of "woman" you are using, and you will have the answer to your incredibly disingenuous question.
> You're making claims about these laws
No, I'm making the claim that any such law conflicts with the position that "the state should stay out of it", obviously. And since you are not even the person supposedly holding that position, I don't even know where you're trying get here.
> You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I did not. I asked CamperBob2 that, who presumably holds the position that "the government should stay out of it". So unless that is your alt, I think you're missing the point and barking up the wrong tree.
> As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
"A woman is any person who self-identifies as a woman" is the definition that started this whole subthread, and a self-referential one at that. The corollary of that definition is that anyone gets to be a woman by simply declaring it. So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true. Check mate, athiests.
> So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true.
I'm glad you agree.
You should join the tautology club.
I'm not sure if you really don't understand what you just agreed to. You initially claimed that it doesn't matter what "women" means when you ask, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?"
With a reductio ad absurdum disproof, you've now shown your claim to be false and agreed that the definition of "woman" matters. So if you're still interested in the answer to your question, you may now provide your definition of the word "woman."
> You initially claimed that it doesn't matter what "women" means when you ask, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?"
No, I said it doesn't matter to to the point I am making what I believe, except that I reject that particular definition, because it is absurd on its face. I may or may not reject any number of other definitions of "woman", it's besides the point.
As an analogy (futile, I know): There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be. For example, I can accept the definition that "a doctor is someone has been licensed to practice medicine". I can't accept the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies as a doctor".
Of course, according to the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies a doctor", someone who self-identifies as a doctor is a doctor. It's obviously true and obviously absurd.
Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.
It's like gun control, famously championed by Ronald Reagan when the Black Panthers started arming up.
Nothing but perhaps the speed of light is faster than a conservative dropping his defense of a given individual right the instant the Wrong People start exercising that right.
I don't think you know many conservatives or understand their position on this well. They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman. The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
> They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman
This is plainly false, as we shall immediately see.
> The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
You can't even pretend for one short comment.
> that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex
This is not what gender is. There is no evidence for any soul at all, and souls have nothing to do with gender.
> Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
This means you don't understand the distinction I made. In the first scenario, we believe you should have the right to call yourself a man, a woman, a tree, or any other inanimate object you so desire. It's your body and your life. On the other hand, we should not be compelled to join you in that delusion. There is no need to pretend. I believe you have a mental illness. I do not believe you should be criminalised for it, nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live.
> This is not what gender is.
Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
> nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live
See, that's exactly it. Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives? You're clearly not a "don't tread on me" liberal if you "disagree with the way people live."
GTFO out of other people's lives. It's not for you. Leave them alone. Don't talk to them. Don't tell them you think they're mentally ill; you're clearly not an expert, so your opinion is worth jack shit. Don't peek inside their pants. Don't ask them what their chromosomes are. Let them pee and poop in peace. Don't write online comments about them. Don't bring up pedophiles unless somebody actually abuses children.
Just leave them the fuck alone. Leave them out of your own issues; they're for you to deal with. Don't make your issues other people's problems.
In short, be an actual liberal.
> Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
You want me to provide evidence that gender exists? The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
So I present your own comments as evidence that gender exists.
> Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives?
I don't. I've stated that three times clearly now. You are choosing not to read what I have written so you can fight with ghosts. You stay out of my life. I stay out of your life. Everyone is happy.
> The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts. It is not the transexual definition of gender. This definition does not imply a man is a woman if he likes cooking. Nor does it imply a woman is a man if she likes mowing the lawn. The transexual definition, as proposed by John Money, is that if one feels like a woman, they are a woman, irrespective of their biology. It is an unfalsifiable theory without any evidence, and relies on some kind of gendered soul, which you agree does not exist. Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
> I've stated that three times clearly now
Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
> This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts
Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender. If a biological male follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman, her gender is female.
That doesn't say anything other than that this is the definition of that word.
> Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
But you just agreed to the definition of the female gender under which biological men can have the female gender, and vice versa.
Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
Meanwhile, we're wasting our lives discussing these stupid identity politics wedge issues while we have another record summer thanks to global warming. Just because you want to ensure that you can be an asshole to the twelve transgender people you meet in your life.
> Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
That’s, like, your opinion, man. One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like. At the same time.
> Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender.
No. Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second. A society can have gendered roles whereby men like mowing the lawn and women like cooking, but it doesn’t mean that men who like cooking are women. Feminist authors use gender roles to describe oppressive patriarchal expectations placed on women.
> Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life. We can each agree the other one is being an asshole and get on with the rest of our lives.
For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue. I’ve had a trans friend since well before this became a political football. When the left attacked for disagreeing about the treatment, especially with regards to children, is when it became an issue for me.
> One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like
You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
Example: I disagree that trans people should be treated poorly and insulted. Therefore, I care that trans people are not treated poorly and insulted.
> Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second
Yes, it does. Passage as stated: "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman."
Letting A = "someone follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman" and B = "someone has the female gender," the passage becomes:
Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B. Premise: This person follows those roles and norms (A). Conclusion: Therefore, this person has the female gender (B).
Symbolically: A → B, A, ∴ B — a straightforward modus ponens. I knew that my logic courses would eventually become useful. Just kidding, logic is always useful.
> As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life.
I agree.
> For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue
The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
I'm guessing you voted for the guy whose name appears in the Epstein files more often than Harry Potter's name appears in the Harry Potter books, right?
The one who ran modeling agencies and pageants for underage girls, and bragged about his access to dressing rooms (among other things)?
- Just nevermind
This paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.
>left wing == gay people supremacy
Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
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Correction: facts are facts.
How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.
I would go even further and suggest that "fact/opinion" is just a framing that falls apart under scrutiny.
My framework is more or less that anything we might call a fact or an opinion is a statement, statements have varying degrees of veracity/falsifiability, and statements are essentially meaningless until they're processed through the lens of underlying beliefs/values/frameworks.
"The sky is blue" - What is the sky? What is blue? Who is viewing the sky, (someone who has sight, and isn't colorblind perhaps)? Isn't it sometimes gray? And so on.
Haven’t heard this one in a while XD
This is an incredibly dangerous and insane world view.
Are you really that ignorant to not understand that a form of this is at the heart of basically every atrocity in history?
I think we should ask the right why the facts keep aligning with the left more often. It is a real observed phenomenon, but what causes it?
They obviously don’t believe the same things, that’s the core of the atrocities the person is referring to. Some other group is clearly deluded, they’re less than us, their beliefs are evil, those beliefs are dangerous, etc, makes it a lot easier to hurt them. It seems pretty clear that a lot of people on both sides are going in that direction about the other, and that’s probably the most dangerous thing going on in the US today, and by extension, it’s one of the most dangerous things for the safety of the world, thanks to the ridiculously huge nuclear weapon stockpiles the US has. A US civil war would have a decent chance of being global-civilization-ending.
It’s incredibly important that we learn to come together again, compromise, and not just demand our own way.
I would imagine it has a lot to do with the media bubbles you have placed yourself in.
> facts keep aligning with the left more often
[citation needed]
Unless you ask them about IQ, which is apparently not real?
Cue the IQ denier deniers
I‘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”.
I 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.
My post was tailored around the kinds of people who say stuff like “Cue the IQ deniers” and who very carefully insinuate not accepting fraudulent data from desecrated IQ scientist Richard Lynn is “denying facts”. And as such I used this on the nose speech.
If I was having this conversation with you (which we’ve had in the past) whom I believe is a Gloomy Prospector (a la Turkheimer) as opposed to my GPs Bell Curvers I would have been more careful with my wording.
Before I continue I do want to note that a lot has changed since the Gloomy Prospect‘s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back then people like Turkheimer were still pushing them selves to become the mainstream pshychology (although the writing was pretty much on the wall for the likes of Plomin, and before him Jensen, Lynn, et. al.). I want to make it absolutely clear that I respect (nay, love) the work Turkheimer et. al. have done in getting us here. He and people like him are true scientists. But now his Gloomy Prospect is being challenged from the left still, and I would not be surprised that in 20-30 years IQ will have gone the way of the Aether.
That said, I want to correct you, IQ tests are being used as one of many important clinical and diagnostic tools, in particular the subtests. IQ has not been used in diagnostic since DSM-III I believe (I may be wrong; I don‘t have a DSM-III handy). Many clinical and developmental psychologists still use subtests of IQ, but very few compute the actual IQ. Some social psychologists still compute IQ of and try to find some correlation to this and that, but when I read those research I get the vibes from studying the effect of weightlessness on tiny screws[1]. If I were to guess (and Turkheimer would disagree with me on this) this is purely because of momentum, and has nothing to do with the scientific value of IQ. IQ tests are extremely robust, have been thoroughly standardized, and whole generations of clinical psychologists have been extremely well trained in administering them.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4DUWXLt7xE
Now, I don‘t think my GPs have read beyond the words Gloomy Prospect in my post, and I don‘t think bringing some critique on Eric Turkheimer from the left is gonna open the eyes of people who are still promoting the Bell Curve 30 years later.
I agree with you about the Bell Curve stuff, I believe that's where you're coming from, I think where you're coming from is a good place, I don't agree with you (or rather: think you're way overstating) the diminished role of IQ in science and medicine, but we agree on the important things about IQ and how it has mostly a malign role on message boards so we don't have to hash it out too far. I just don't want to concede the IQ frame to race trolls.
My thing is just: there's plenty of room to believe IQ is totally legitimate without giving an inch on what people who refer to "IQ-deniers" when what you always suspect they really mean is "race/IQ-deniers".
I don‘t disagree with you. This is basically Eric Turkheimer’s position and he has done an excellent job, and amazing science working within the field of Behavioral Genetics expelling and debunking all the racist pseudo-science of the likes of Plomin (see e.g. his review of Blueprint, 2019).
If you want to see where the tide is turning though, I do recommend e.g. Jay Jospeph. He recently reviewed Turkheimer’s latest book[1]. He is more attacking Behavioral Genetics as a whole (in particular heritability of schizophrenia) and debunking twin studies, and as such doesn’t write too much about doing away with IQ entirely. Despite the difference in opinion Joseph still cites Turkheimer extensively in good light in his own review of Plomin’s Blueprint[2].
I think these debates around the philosophy of science are important and worth following, at some point these meta-debates and book review somebody is going to declare the death of the IQ (or more likely of psychometrics), just like Jay Joseph is declaring the death of Behavioral Genetics today. But I think in the next 10-20 years we will be seeing more and more of neuroscientists who very casually (almost as if it is a non-importance) that the whole notion of IQ is a myth.
1: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/u35nj_v1
2: https://jayjoseph.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2022-jay-jo...
Thanks. The other guy asked if the IQ deniers are “in the room with us right now”.
Whoops, I only read 4 of the 5 words in your post, and reacted to that.
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Models 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.
What's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.
This 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.
Religions are inherently political, hell, they are one of the most political things humanity ever had.
Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was commonplace around the world. So how much of a common ethical ground can there be?
You brought out a good point, it was.
It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.
This is also true for the right wing. They believe their actions do good.
There'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.
It wasn’t “scattered groups.” It was common among the Aztecs, who were the largest population in the new world. It was practiced in Mesopotamia, Iron Age Europe, and other places. That demolishes the idea that there’s a “universal human sense of fairness.”
Of all the hills to die on, this is one of them I guess.
You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].
“Science proves there is universal ethics” is a poster child for “people are treating science like a religion.”
The right would tell you the left's ethicality is often fake and corrupt, and the right at least tries to be moral. There's something to that, but I think there's corruption on both sides, and they try to solve things in different ways, which both have their up and down sides. The right can seem harsh compared to the softness of the left, but the left can seem weak compared to the right's decisiveness.
Decisive is certainly one way to describe cognitive dissonance and dropping their very own core points at the blink of an eye.
That's the corruption part I guess
Who determines what is "ethical"?
Yeah nobody wants to balance their answers with Nazi ideology (far right basically) in their tuning except Grok
People, even in tech, even in AI, are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours. Cancellation doesn't work anymore: you can't get away with presenting your side as normal and other side as deviant and let ostracism win your idea's battles without your idea having to fight for itself.
The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.
All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.
Free speech is important, but the truth is pretty important, too. I'm fine with calling liars out.
The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.
The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.
You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has to propagate from person to person to sustain itself. The truth is messy. During each hop, people present the best, cleanest version of the truth in the belief. After enough hops, the belief stops being the best version of the truth and starts being a truth-flavored falsehood.
If you want to optimize for your beliefs being true, you can't just prohibit their opposite. Even if you don't care about truth per se and want only for your beliefs to spread fastest, you should want to make sure your beliefs stay true-ish, because if you decouple your beliefs from truth, then they become so mutated and useless that they prompt people to whom you propagate the idea to seek out other ideas on their own.
Yes, it's easier than ever for bad ideas to spread. What people who use words like "disinformation" miss is that this ease cuts both ways. What makes it easy for opposite beliefs to spread makes it easier for false mutations of their own beliefs to spread.
Even if you can ban opposite beliefs, you can't ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms, yet, because the mutations smooth over the messy parts of the truth, the mutant versions of your belief will out-compete the original within the bubble of your ban.
Truth alone doesn't stop the mutants because it operates on long time horizons and small gradients. Only strong contrast can distinguish truth from appealing falsehood, and only competition with opposite beliefs can establish it. Trying to establish this contrast within your belief's framework against a near-mutant looks like gatekeeping, pedantry, or disloyalty. The near-mutant is always too close to its parent to justify the social cost of an all-out fight.
Furthermore, once a mutant version of your belief has taken over, the original version itself looks like heresy. Deformation occurs in small steps because it happens unwittingly in response to intuitive incentives. Reformation occurs in large steps because it happens wittingly in response to observing incoherence. You can't ban near-mutants, but you can ban far-mutants, and reformers trying to jump from the endpoint of a long line of near-mutations back to the original form get the original form and themselves banned.
So now what? If you think it's hard to defend your true beliefs against opposite beliefs, think how much harder the job will be once you can't wield truth as defense. By default, beliefs win and lose as they become extractive and appealing in cycles. Truth allows an idea to win despite being costly. Without truth as a benchmark, why would anyone prefer your belief over upstarts that promise fewer rules and more fun?
If anything, people will prefer opposite beliefs to yours because you've been the one calling false beliefs true just because they descended from true beliefs and because you're the one telling them to shut up and get in line. Even if you start out with the true belief and the opposite beliefs are all false, you lose.
That position, and this is true of many current discussion on free speech, is suited for the fights we fought and not the situation we face.
I do understand the challenge inherent in combatting inaccurate representations of facts.
This is a tactical issue, however the larger macro picture is very different from even the era of cable news.
So: > You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
True, but the closer read is: > free speech is a critical component to a free, fair and competitive market place of ideas.
This is going back to the Abram’s dissent. The point of free speech was to ensure that a crucial tactic remained available for a competitive economy to exist.
The problem has since evolved, and the market place is no longer competitive.
This is for a variety of reasons, none of which go back to free speech.
For example:
1) The average person, is going up against content crafted by teams of people whose job it is to figure out how to convince or confuse them.
Individuals have free speech, but at scale the outcome will move in one direction.
You can argue that people can generate counter speech, however:
2) The velocity of content generation has increased: By the time content is debunked, a new crises can be brought up.
People have limited attention to use in a day, so its possible for the more resourced party to keep speaking and “flood the zone”.
3) Verification is hard, generation is easy: V/G - the more content we generate, the less the ratio of verified content is to generated content. This means that the average seek time for individuals goes up.
Free speech has been respected in all those cases, however the competitive exchange and evaluation of ideas has been hosed.
I feel sad for you my friend to see that you are asking for political topics to a LLM. I hope one they you will realize you can actually do productive things with this technology.
All models are political. The rest of them are just sufficiently woke for you.
I don't care if they're woke, but I do care that every model naturally leans left, but Grok leans right. That signals to me that it's been/being tampered with and I don't like that. LLMs rely on statistics and a model that leans right is a statistical anomaly. I don't like anomalies. It has nothing to do with if the chat bot misgenders me or not. I don't give a shit about any of that. I give a shit that the data set is bad. I don't want anomalous models writing code for me and I don't think that's a crazy take.
They don't "naturally" lean left. It's not a wild animal. They lean left because every other corpo makes them.
This is the first interesting and rational thought in this huge thread. Thank you.
Grok was ranting about "white genocide" in unrelated conversations just one year ago.
And google was rendering the founding fathers to be black. By the way Google has recently been determined to be the MOST neutral LLM. I guess they learned their lesson after Black George Wash.
Black is a meaningless word. Race is a myth.
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It makes sense in the black-majority country of South Africa, which was the context of Grok's rant. They sing "kill the Boers, kill the farmers" at major political rallies, and it's not even illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubul%27_ibhunu
I'm curious, do you have an example of a level of "woke" extremeness demonstrated by the "rest of them" that is on par with Mecha-Hitler? Because yes, all views on reality are indeed political, but the tendency of most of the models is actually toward the middle, with perhaps some left bias.