Political Bias in LLMs: Unaligned Moral Values in Agent-centric Simulations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Münker, Simon
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Münker, Simon
author_facet Münker, Simon
contents Contemporary research in social sciences increasingly utilizes state-of-the-art generative language models to annotate or generate content. While these models achieve benchmark-leading performance on common language tasks, their application to novel out-of-domain tasks remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we investigate how personalized language models align with human responses on the Moral Foundation Theory Questionnaire. We adapt open-source generative language models to different political personas and repeatedly survey these models to generate synthetic data sets where model-persona combinations define our sub-populations. Our analysis reveals that models produce inconsistent results across multiple repetitions, yielding high response variance. Furthermore, the alignment between synthetic data and corresponding human data from psychological studies shows a weak correlation, with conservative persona-prompted models particularly failing to align with actual conservative populations. These results suggest that language models struggle to coherently represent ideologies through in-context prompting due to their alignment process. Thus, using language models to simulate social interactions requires measurable improvements in in-context optimization or parameter manipulation to align with psychological and sociological stereotypes properly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_11415
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Political Bias in LLMs: Unaligned Moral Values in Agent-centric Simulations
Münker, Simon
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Contemporary research in social sciences increasingly utilizes state-of-the-art generative language models to annotate or generate content. While these models achieve benchmark-leading performance on common language tasks, their application to novel out-of-domain tasks remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we investigate how personalized language models align with human responses on the Moral Foundation Theory Questionnaire. We adapt open-source generative language models to different political personas and repeatedly survey these models to generate synthetic data sets where model-persona combinations define our sub-populations. Our analysis reveals that models produce inconsistent results across multiple repetitions, yielding high response variance. Furthermore, the alignment between synthetic data and corresponding human data from psychological studies shows a weak correlation, with conservative persona-prompted models particularly failing to align with actual conservative populations. These results suggest that language models struggle to coherently represent ideologies through in-context prompting due to their alignment process. Thus, using language models to simulate social interactions requires measurable improvements in in-context optimization or parameter manipulation to align with psychological and sociological stereotypes properly.
title Political Bias in LLMs: Unaligned Moral Values in Agent-centric Simulations
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11415