I don't know what the attainable ideal is. Neutrality according to some well-defined political spectrum would be fair, but the median person in any country -- as the world drifts rightward -- could be well off center and denounce the neutral model as biased.
We should at least measure the models and place them on the political spectrum in their model cards.
Create a new brand of political ideology specific to LLMs that no human would support. Then we don’t have to worry about bias toward existing political beliefs.
The dirty secret that is always a wrecking ball to this vision of politics-on-a-spectrum is that information and misinformation can and often do tend to exist along predictably polarized lines. Are you a "conservative" if you were rightly skeptical of some aspects of left-wing environmentalism (e.g. plastics recycling, hype about hydrogen cars) or about George W. Bush supposedly stealing Ohio in 2004, or about apologetically revisionist interpretations of China's human rights abuses? Are you liberal if you think Joe Biden was the rightful winner in 2020 or that global warming is real?
Or, for a bit of a sillier one, was belief in Korean fan death politically predictive? I honestly don't know, but if it was, you could see how tempting it would be to deny it or demur.
Those individual issues are not the same of course, on a number of levels. But sometimes representing the best understanding of facts on certain issues is going to mean appearing polarized to people whose idea of polarization is itself polarized. Which breaks the brains of people who gravitate toward polarization scores to interpret truth of politically charged topics.
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I don't know what the attainable ideal is. Neutrality according to some well-defined political spectrum would be fair, but the median person in any country -- as the world drifts rightward -- could be well off center and denounce the neutral model as biased.
We should at least measure the models and place them on the political spectrum in their model cards.
Create a new brand of political ideology specific to LLMs that no human would support. Then we don’t have to worry about bias toward existing political beliefs.
It’s bad enough that people are trying to have romantic relationships with these things. Now people want them to have politics.
It would be closer to neutrality, if the LLM simply responded according to is training data, without further hidden prompts.
The dirty secret that is always a wrecking ball to this vision of politics-on-a-spectrum is that information and misinformation can and often do tend to exist along predictably polarized lines. Are you a "conservative" if you were rightly skeptical of some aspects of left-wing environmentalism (e.g. plastics recycling, hype about hydrogen cars) or about George W. Bush supposedly stealing Ohio in 2004, or about apologetically revisionist interpretations of China's human rights abuses? Are you liberal if you think Joe Biden was the rightful winner in 2020 or that global warming is real?
Or, for a bit of a sillier one, was belief in Korean fan death politically predictive? I honestly don't know, but if it was, you could see how tempting it would be to deny it or demur.
Those individual issues are not the same of course, on a number of levels. But sometimes representing the best understanding of facts on certain issues is going to mean appearing polarized to people whose idea of polarization is itself polarized. Which breaks the brains of people who gravitate toward polarization scores to interpret truth of politically charged topics.