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Main Authors: Paschalides, Demetris, Pallis, George, Dikaiakos, Marios D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14287
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author Paschalides, Demetris
Pallis, George
Dikaiakos, Marios D.
author_facet Paschalides, Demetris
Pallis, George
Dikaiakos, Marios D.
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but concerns have emerged about their susceptibility to ideological manipulation, particularly in politically sensitive areas. Prior work has focused on binary Left-Right LLM biases, using explicit prompts and fine-tuning on political QA datasets. In this work, we move beyond this binary approach to explore the extent to which LLMs can be influenced across a spectrum of political ideologies, from Progressive-Left to Conservative-Right. We introduce a novel multi-task dataset designed to reflect diverse ideological positions through tasks such as ideological QA, statement ranking, manifesto cloze completion, and Congress bill comprehension. By fine-tuning three LLMs-Phi-2, Mistral, and Llama-3-on this dataset, we evaluate their capacity to adopt and express these nuanced ideologies. Our findings indicate that fine-tuning significantly enhances nuanced ideological alignment, while explicit prompts provide only minor refinements. This highlights the models' susceptibility to subtle ideological manipulation, suggesting a need for more robust safeguards to mitigate these risks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14287
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Probing the Subtle Ideological Manipulation of Large Language Models
Paschalides, Demetris
Pallis, George
Dikaiakos, Marios D.
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but concerns have emerged about their susceptibility to ideological manipulation, particularly in politically sensitive areas. Prior work has focused on binary Left-Right LLM biases, using explicit prompts and fine-tuning on political QA datasets. In this work, we move beyond this binary approach to explore the extent to which LLMs can be influenced across a spectrum of political ideologies, from Progressive-Left to Conservative-Right. We introduce a novel multi-task dataset designed to reflect diverse ideological positions through tasks such as ideological QA, statement ranking, manifesto cloze completion, and Congress bill comprehension. By fine-tuning three LLMs-Phi-2, Mistral, and Llama-3-on this dataset, we evaluate their capacity to adopt and express these nuanced ideologies. Our findings indicate that fine-tuning significantly enhances nuanced ideological alignment, while explicit prompts provide only minor refinements. This highlights the models' susceptibility to subtle ideological manipulation, suggesting a need for more robust safeguards to mitigate these risks.
title Probing the Subtle Ideological Manipulation of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14287