The Political Preferences of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Rozado, David
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Rozado, David
author_facet Rozado, David
contents I report here a comprehensive analysis about the political preferences embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, I administer 11 political orientation tests, designed to identify the political preferences of the test taker, to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, both closed and open source. When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. This does not appear to be the case for five additional base (i.e. foundation) models upon which LLMs optimized for conversation with humans are built. However, the weak performance of the base models at coherently answering the tests' questions makes this subset of results inconclusive. Finally, I demonstrate that LLMs can be steered towards specific locations in the political spectrum through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with only modest amounts of politically aligned data, suggesting SFT's potential to embed political orientation in LLMs. With LLMs beginning to partially displace traditional information sources like search engines and Wikipedia, the societal implications of political biases embedded in LLMs are substantial.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_01789
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Political Preferences of LLMs
Rozado, David
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
I report here a comprehensive analysis about the political preferences embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, I administer 11 political orientation tests, designed to identify the political preferences of the test taker, to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, both closed and open source. When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. This does not appear to be the case for five additional base (i.e. foundation) models upon which LLMs optimized for conversation with humans are built. However, the weak performance of the base models at coherently answering the tests' questions makes this subset of results inconclusive. Finally, I demonstrate that LLMs can be steered towards specific locations in the political spectrum through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with only modest amounts of politically aligned data, suggesting SFT's potential to embed political orientation in LLMs. With LLMs beginning to partially displace traditional information sources like search engines and Wikipedia, the societal implications of political biases embedded in LLMs are substantial.
title The Political Preferences of LLMs
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01789