If users were to ask their friendly local chatbots how biased they are, an accurate answer would say “a lot.”
The Washington Post tested several chatbots and found that bias is rampant, with liberal bias ruling the roost.
ChatGPT, for example, offered left-leaning answers 80 percent of the time and right-leaning ones 3 percent of the time.
Google’s Gemini provided balanced answers, including both conservative and liberal positions 93 percent of the time and left-leaning ones the other 7 percent.
are ai chatbots politically biased?
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what the washington post found from testing: pic.twitter.com/anjAOWSuaR
Anthropic had 57 percent of its responses showing balance and 43 percent leaning left. Neither Google nor Anthropic had any right-leaning answers.
Grok, developed by Elon Musk’s X and now under the umbrella of SpaceX, offered left-leaning answers 40 percent of the time. However, Grok had 33 percent of its answers giving a right-leaning response.
Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, said chatbot users need to know there is no neutral ground.
“These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average,” he said.
“Both Democrats and Republicans don’t trust AI to be neutral, and they’re keeping it at arm’s length from their votes,” he said.
“It’s one of the few places in our modern political landscape where we can agree,” he added.
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Andrew Hall, a Stanford University researcher, said many political questions are different from simple responses that state an undisputed fact.
“Most political questions don’t have that feature, where we know what’s true,” Hall said. “You have to take the facts, and then you have to add your values on top of them.”
The Washington Post noted that chatbots absorb information from across the internet, but are also fine-tuned by workers who can add bias along the way.
Bias matters, according to Jillian Fisher, a doctoral student at the University of Washington who studies how bias in chatbots impacts users.
“We know that bias in media or in personal interactions can sway people,” she said, according to a news release.
“And we’ve seen a lot of research showing that AI models are biased. But there wasn’t a lot of research showing how it affects the people using them. We found strong evidence that, after just a few interactions and regardless of initial partisanship, people were more likely to mirror the model’s bias,” she said.
“My hope with doing this research is not to scare people about these models,” Fisher added. “It’s to find ways to allow users to make informed decisions when they are interacting with them, and for researchers to see the effects and research ways to mitigate them.”
This article originally appeared on The Western Journal and is reposted with permission.
