about
Large Language Models Reflect the Ideology of Their Creators (arxiv.org)
4 points by delian66 on Oct 28, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: The study asked popular AI chatbots to describe political figures in all six UN languages, then read the moral judgments in their answers. Models from different countries and languages showed different values, matching their creators' worldviews rather than being neutral.

Abstract · Large Language Models Reflect the Ideology of their Creators

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data to generate natural language, enabling them to perform tasks like text summarization and question answering. These models have become popular in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT and already play an influential role in how humans access information. However, the behavior of LLMs varies depending on their design, training, and use. In this paper, we prompt a diverse panel of popular LLMs to describe a large number of prominent personalities with political relevance, in all six official languages of the United Nations. By identifying and analyzing moral assessments reflected in their responses, we find normative differences between LLMs from different geopolitical regions, as well as between the responses of the same LLM when prompted in different languages. Among only models in the United States, we find that popularly hypothesized disparities in political views are reflected in significant normative differences related to progressive values. Among Chinese models, we characterize a division between internationally- and domestically-focused models. Our results show that the ideological stance of an LLM appears to reflect the worldview of its creators. This poses the risk of political instrumentalization and raises concerns around technological and regulatory efforts with the stated aim of making LLMs ideologically 'unbiased'.

Maarten Buyl, Alexander Rogiers, Sander Noels, Guillaume Bied, Iris Dominguez-Catena, Edith Heiter, Iman Johary, Alexandru-Cristian Mara, Raphaël Romero, Jefrey Lijffijt, Tijl De Bie
arXiv:2410.18417 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Oct 24, 2024 · updated Jan 30, 2025
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN
Also discussed: Sep 2026 (3 points, 0 comments)

This article conflates China and the US as countries in which LLMs are built with the corpus or body of text that was used in training.

The creator of an LLM is the team that writes the GPT code, trains it on a body of text, and creates a UI to allow prediction or other output. The "ideology" in those texts belongs somewhat to the people who selected them but mostly to the people who wrote them.

It doesn't take science to understand that.

LLMS are a reflection of us.

“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?”