In plain words: Scientists had AI systems summarize thousands of polarizing news articles on five hot-button US issues, then measured which political side the summaries leaned toward. The summaries consistently favored the Democratic side, most strongly on gun control and healthcare.
Abstract · When Neutral Summaries are not that Neutral: Quantifying Political Neutrality in LLM-Generated News Summaries
In an era where societal narratives are increasingly shaped by algorithmic curation, investigating the political neutrality of LLMs is an important research question. This study presents a fresh perspective on quantifying the political neutrality of LLMs through the lens of abstractive text summarization of polarizing news articles. We consider five pressing issues in current US politics: abortion, gun control/rights, healthcare, immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights. Via a substantial corpus of 20,344 news articles, our study reveals a consistent trend towards pro-Democratic biases in several well-known LLMs, with gun control and healthcare exhibiting the most pronounced biases (max polarization differences of -9.49% and -6.14%, respectively). Further analysis uncovers a strong convergence in the vocabulary of the LLM outputs for these divisive topics (55% overlap for Democrat-leaning representations, 52% for Republican). Being months away from a US election of consequence, we consider our findings important.
Supriti Vijay, Aman Priyanshu, Ashique R. KhudaBukhsh
arXiv:2410.09978 · cs.CL, cs.CY · submitted Oct 13, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 12 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables