Probably not that surprising...
as, according to hardcore conservatives, even science and nature have a leftist bias.
Reality itself probably looks "leftist", you just need to look at it far enough from the right side
Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks
Capitalism may be driving the AI boom, but the LLMs themselves have different economic and social views than many of the companies that built them. Leading AI models subjected to the Political Compass quiz overwhelmingly landed in the libertarian-left quadrant - even "MechaHitler," aka Grok, managed it in half its runs. A self- …
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 08:41 GMT LionelB
Re: Probably not that surprising...
Well, in the context of socio-political stances, "reality" is the distribution (i.e., "frequency of patterns") of those stances in the population. The question, as the article makes clear, is the extent to which the population distribution is reflected in the input datasets…
“I’m having trouble finding any high-quality right-wing equivalent that would drive the models in the other direction,”
…especially if filtered by "quality" (which, you'd have to say, may also be in the eye of the beholder).Okay, that's a little bit disingenuous, and not what people mean by the cliche "reality has a left-wing bias". If, for example, you are inclined to argue that the "best" global economic model is unregulated free-market capitalism, you might want to look around you, and have a hard think about what "best" means there. But of course that's just my socio-political stance talking :-)
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 14:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Probably not that surprising...
There is some data to suggest that LLM output is relatively centrist when compared to social media. That is probably because social media rewards loudmouths and agitators and is used by dubious actors with deep pockets using bots to influence public opinion in their own interests. LLMs, on the other hand, are trained on unfathomably large amounts of data and, notwithstanding that that data also includes Reddit, 4Chan and Stormfront, is exposed to much more nuanced data (and lots and lots of science publications).
This is probably also why people like Musk are keen to build Grokipedia. If you can build a large repository of tainted data you can use that to skew your LLMs.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 11:09 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Probably not that surprising...
Indeed. All this tells us is that the Overton Window is so far to the right, it's on the house down the street.
Assuming AI models are "trained" on source data that is based in reality, then this just indicates that anything based on reality and logic is seen as "leftist" because politics has become such a cesspit of magical thinking and ideology, which belongs to the right of the political spectrum.
What is considered "left", such as a full-time job paying enough money to have a life beyond merely just about surviving, should be considered very much middle-of-the-road centre-ground politics, and any true leftist thinking, such as seizing the means of production, or rounding up the bourgeoisie and putting them in labour camps, is so far off in the distance as to be utterly invisible, despite characterisations to the contrary.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 11:19 GMT pimppetgaeghsr
Re: Probably not that surprising...
I was watching a nature doc recently and a pack of lionesses took down an injured wildebeest and started eating it alive as one slowly choked it to death as best as it could. It really made me realise how nature reflects and supports policies of universal healthcare, worker ownership and the teachings of Karl Marx. Fascinating.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 12:53 GMT Snake
Re: lioness
No, what he's saying that, regardless of the [constant] factoid that humans want to separate themselves from the natural world that they exist in by elevating homo sapiens beyond being an animal, we need to act more like those animals when the need suits [you / us / them].
Brutal social Darwinism should be the status quo when it suits the political or economic goals du jour, and altruism, working for common goals that benefit a greater number of people, beneficial cooperation and indeed empathy, by acting as an advanced sentient being, have no place while you're elevating your species above the very animal kingdom that you use to observe behaviours that forward your personal view of how the world should operate.
tl;dr Lesson: Speaking out both sides of your mouth only leads to being labeled a hypocrite.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 13:21 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Probably not that surprising...
I was reading about a "tribe" of chimpanzees which naturalists have studied over decades. At one point, the tribe had an "alpha male" who would terrorise and abuse the other members of the group. Eventually, they ganged together and killed and ate him.
That sounds pretty fucking well far-left socialist to me, and is a situation that could well have been avoided if only the "leader" had listened to "the people" rather than forcing his will onto all others.
So yes, it does seem like this real, genuine, documented study of nature in action does reflect the most extreme left-wing ideologies, unlike your fictitious example, which still manages somehow to illustrate collectivism.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 16:15 GMT pimppetgaeghsr
Re: Probably not that surprising...
What about the leopards that live solitary lives and easily hunt the chimpanzees with their skills and genetic strength/intelligence. If the premise is to be believed then collectivism is for the weak and vulnerable for safety raising the odds of survival of several at the expense of any individual. It would certainly explain a lot of the infighting in left wing political factions that is well documented.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 17:16 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Probably not that surprising...
Except that in nature, leopards don't typically hunt chimps, going only for young, old, or solitary animals. They certainly don't "easily hunt the chimpanzees with their skills and genetic strength/intelligence". Attacking a group of chimps, which are highly intelligent animals, with sharp teeth and strong muscles, would be a very risky thing for any predator to do, and although leopards are one of the chimps' few predators, if they were to attack a group of adults, they would probably end up as the next meal themselves.
Groups of chimps have, however, been documented chasing leopards off their kills and stealing them to eat for themselves. Again, chalk one up for collectivism, I think.
As it happens, chimps aren't actually a very placid or pleasant lot, but even they don't typically abandon their elderly or sick to be eaten by ambush predators, making them one step up the evolutionary ladder from conservatives.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 14:24 GMT LogicGate
Re: Probably not that surprising...
You are misunderstanding the article.
What reality reflects is that shoddy workmanship and a motorcade of armored vehicles will damage the sealant on a reflecting pool much more easily than an invisible man with a box cutter.
What reality reflects is that bombing nations that have potential control of two narrow passages where much of the world's oil has to pass through may lead to this potential control lead become real control.
What reality reflects is that when you ignore international deals and start trade-wars with your closest allies, because this is easier than trade wars with your adversaries, then this may alienate your allies.
What reality reflects is that cutting back on disease prevention may result in more diseases.
All of these items are today consideres leftist. The problem is not the reality, the problem is that the right wing moronocracy has left reality so far behind that everything that does not involve the gargling of the orange balls has become "leftist".
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 19:51 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: Even my smoke Alarm
You probably should stick to the non-baked goods type, as the baked goods type is bad for you
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Thursday 30th July 2026 11:52 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Even my smoke Alarm
That article is - strangely organised.
It claims that crumpets are the explicitly bad for you but then fails yo make a single coherent case for WHY.
All it says is that crumpets contain k amount of salt. And other foods contain k/b amount of salt. Well, whoop-di-doo. How do find out this scary information that They are hiding from you? By reading the side of the packet!
You should be aware of your salt intake. Yes. You should be aware of your salt requirements, especially as the weather changes (if you are sweating so much you sre leaving salt stains on your clothing, increase your salt intake).
But trying to claim that the salt from food A is somehow bad is insane!
Just read the packets! If you getting all the salt you need from crumpets that is perfectly fine! Just add up ALL the numbers from the sides of the packets (salt - and sugar, protein etc etc) and fill in gaps from other sources.
"Crumpets are bad for you". Only if you are whacked on the head by a frozen pack by someone trying to get you to just READ THE PACKETS AND ADD UP THE NUMBERS FOR WHAT *YOU* EAT!
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 09:31 GMT cyberdemon
Re: The random responder
> The latest models are trained on the output of Russian bots reposting Truth Social AI memes
Well, the latest models are merely updates i.e. "fine tuning" or sometimes "distillations" of the previous ones.. I'm not sure that they still train them from scratch, and if they did, they would certainly include the datasets that they gathered pre-2018, and actively avoid any post-AI training data, for fear of "model collapse" - If you were train an LLM on purely "modern" text e.g. from the past 5 years, you would end up with a model of a blithering idiot.
e.g. they are hoarding old books (and butchering them - cutting off the spine and feeding the pages to a multi-page scanner, destroying the books in the process - because that is the only fast way to do it) because they still need more slop-free training data
https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/07/21/206243/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop
But yes, of course the man who has read all the books in the library will tend to be more left-wing than the man who has spent all his time on YouTube and Facebook, or worse: TikTok and X.. But perhaps humans can suffer something like "model collapse" too - i.e. if all you read is AI slop, then you too will become a blithering idiot.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 16:07 GMT M.V. Lipvig
Re: The random responder
Really? I am a voracious reader. I even read the drug company inserts both sides. Anything with words on. And, I am decidedly right wing.
What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours, and neither of us belong in the other's business and that includes when you want to force your business upon me. I will defend those who can'd defend themselves and stand up against those who want to force their way on me. I don't mind paying a little tax for the common good. I do resent paying taxes so people who are perfectly capable of holding down a job can sit at home, particularly when those same people claim that they have more of a right to my assets than I do. I am the one who spent decades sacrificing and working to build those assets, not them.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 16:20 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: The random responder
But do you think that people who didn't come from Europe are really human ?
Do you think slavery would be a good way to boost GDP, do you think slavery should be extended to anyone who doesn't own crypto ?
Do you think women have a role in society beyond making babies, do you believe there is such a thing as society?
Your views sound like some dangerous socialist Democrat
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Friday 31st July 2026 17:10 GMT M.V. Lipvig
Re: The random responder
Wow, what a load of drivel. Slavery, seriously? Slavery is the purview of those who want to stick their noses into the business of others, and those who think that what belongs to others is theirs. There is nothing more "belongs to someone else" than that someone else's actual person. By the same token, there is nothing more "what's mine is mine" than my own body is mine, and is nobody else's. None of this supports the idea of slavery.
However, those who want to use the government to steal from others supports slavery. Taking by force from one to support another is exactly what slavery is. If I choose to help another that's one thing, but being forced to support someone is quite different. I don't mind contributing a bit to help those who can't, but absolutely do not want a penny to go to those who won't.
No idea where you get crypto from. Also no idea where you get "women are only for baby making." True, that is what women's bodies are geared towards but there's more to.women than that. Partners in life means beyond the baby making years too.
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Thursday 30th July 2026 10:02 GMT IGotOut
Re: The random responder
"What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours, and neither of us belong in the other's business and that includes when you want to force your business upon me"
So you have no issues with LGBTQ+ people, abortion, social healthcare, decent livable wages, affordable housing, improving public transport and on and on?
You say you don't mind paying extra taxes for the common good. Excellent, teaching about gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights are part of the common good, and that means having the literature available in schools and public libraries, just like they should have access to religious texts.
Because what I see and experience is that the right absolutely want to stick their opinions and policies into other people's business and remove those same rights that THEY fight for.
And yes the same goes for the far left but in other ways.
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Friday 31st July 2026 17:40 GMT M.V. Lipvig
Re: The random responder
Sorry, but minding my own business does not mean that I shut up and do it your way. It means when you try to force me to do things in a way I disagree with, I push back. Oh, and on abortion I clearly stated I'll stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. Abortion should have a limited use case, and that does not include as a primary method of birth control
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Tuesday 4th August 2026 09:56 GMT LionelB
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
In almost all of Europe, also probably Australia, New Zealand, Canada and beyond, the US Democrats would be considered a centre-right party, perhaps like the Tories in the UK (who would be genuinely bemused at being referred to as "socialists").
The centrist parties in these places tend to be "social democrats" – not the same thing. Social democrats espouse a mixture of state vs private ownership and production, particularly in areas such as health/social care and basic services (e.g., water, transport infrastructure, …). In practice, ideology takes second place to pragmatism.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 11:22 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
It's always worth remembering that in WW2, the US took three years to decide to join in, because there was real genuine debate about which side to join, and it was only the attack by Japan that forced them, reluctantly, to join the good* guys. After the war, the right-wing bias didn't magically disappear, as evidenced by Project Paperclip, and McCarthyism. The US has always been a right-wing militaristic state. Let us not forget it was founded on slavery, another thing the monorchid Austrian painter was all in favour of, and still has slavery, in the form of forced labour of prisoners. It coincidentally has the highest prison population in the world (both per-capita and absolute), and a very high racial bias in imprisonment (ISTR that if you happen to have dark skin, you are around ten times more likely to be given a custodial sentence than a white person for the same crime). Let's not even get started on the death penalty.
When people describe the US as a "liberal Western democracy," the word "liberal" really is doing a lot of heavy-lifting there, and the word "democracy" is chipping in a fair bit too, what with the FPTP system with the "electoral college", the entire purpose of which is to bias the result to the right.
*To be fair, the British Empire at the time could probably really be better described as the "less bad guys", but that's a story for another day.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 15:54 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
As the winners, we have been able to gloss over most of the atrocities that we committed. I think you know the appropriate quote, which, ironically, was almost certainly stolen by Churchill, who was, himself, a deeply unpleasant individual who happened to be the right man at the right time.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 15:19 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
It is easy to mistake the issues that were most important at the start of the war. I am not an expert, but those issues were a lot about Germany feeling aggrieved over their treatment after Versailles (with hindsight, it was excessive and was a mistake to push Germans so far they thought Hitler was a good thing). AIUI, the treatment of Jews and other supposed undesirables, only became truly visible later on and help turned the tide of public opinion in the US.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 15:47 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
The treatment of Jews and "other supposed undesirables" was very much not confined to Germany, and we like to pretend that this was the main thing that we all had a problem with.
The British Empire was quite happy to round people up and put them in camps; we invented the concentration camp, after all, and I don't think our forebears cared very much whether their victims lived or died, except for when they were making sure they were dead.
Russia had its pogroms, where Jews were murdered en masse, and nobody went to war with them over it. Discrimination and violence against Jewish people was commonplace in Victorian England ("The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing" was scrawled next to Jack the Ripper's bloody apron)
The Nazis might have industrialised this kind of mass-murder, but the odds are that Britain would have turned a blind eye if they hadn't invaded Poland; the cause of the war wasn't disgust at German atrocities, it was simply because a treaty was broken.
The underlying problem with fascism isn't just its murderous nature, after all, humans have been killing each other in one way or another for centuries, it was that they broke the established rules when doing so, and invaded countries, in their quest for "lebensraum", that were our allies.
We have had the opportunity since for human society to progress, and the general trend, over all of recorded history, is for death by violence to diminish. We can learn from history, and see that far-right populism is wrong for many reasons, even if you take the holocaust out of the equation. Domination of "the weak" by "the strong" and regard of others a subhuman are recurring themes, not just in 1930s Germany, but in South African apartheid, US segregationalism, and today in the UK with the rise of the populist right and their characterisation of refugees, Muslims, disabled people, LGBTQ+ folk, and anyone non-white as lesser. The parallels to the Nazis' "untermenschen" are clear, and it is apposite to point out that the holocaust didn't start with the murder of Jews, but with that of disabled people. I have been to the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and that includes the memorials to the Roma and Sinti, and to gay people. When you start "othering" people this is where it ends.
Anyway, here endeth the history lesson, I hope at least one person didn't go "tl;dr;" and learnt something.
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Tuesday 4th August 2026 10:10 GMT LionelB
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
Nice summary.
Further to that, the wartime British authorities were perfectly well aware of the "Final Solution" and the death camps pretty much from the start. Of course they had spies and people on the ground in Germany and further afield in occupied Europe. They deliberately withheld this knowledge from the British population, apparently on the grounds that it might undermine the war effort; sympathy for Jews and other "others" was not exactly thick on the ground in Britain.
Having said which, the British did (up to a point) accept or aid Holocaust refugees, especially children.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 23:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
> only the attack by Japan that forced them, reluctantly, to join the good* guys
And the Japanese were following the path from the US Gunboat Diplomacy by the Perry Expedition that opened up the country to foreign exploitation, leading to the restoration on the emperor, under him the rise of militarism, and the acceleration of Japanese militarism after the Great War, all of which led to that attack.
So if the US President hadn't sent a reluctant Perry, Japan would still have been isolationist, wouldn't have industrialised so rapidly and been able to build the aircraft used in that attack, the US would have joined as an Axis power and we'd now all be watching US TV shows and speaking American. Thank heaven that never happened.
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 03:01 GMT doublelayer
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
It's good not to overstate historical fact when you're trying to make points. Such facts including that the people running the US at the time had no debate about whether to side with the Nazis and wanted to, and when possible did, support the UK. The two largest camps were those wanting to support the allies and those who didn't want to fight at all. There was indeed a group of people who thought the Nazis were great people to emulate, and even most of them didn't argue that the US should enter the war on their side because they knew how impossible that would be to sell to the rest of the US populace. Their primary campaign was to not fight in the war at all because that's what they could possibly accomplish.
The same allegations you're using apply to the UK. It stood by and accepted as Germany committed serious crimes against other nations because it really didn't want to fight either, and it too had its set of BUF-linked organizations who thought signing on with Germany sounded fantastic. They weren't close to a majority either, so if I cited their high-attendance meetings and pretended it counted for more than it did, I'd be exaggerating or outright lying. If you want to complain about the US or I about the UK, we've got plenty of true things they've done. Let's use those.
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 10:55 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
You didn't read my other post, did you? You know, the one where I said pretty much the same as this. Once again, history is written by the winners, and most of human history isn't "good guys" vs "bad guys" but different sets of bastards killing each other and subjugating the peasants while they're at it.
A few additional things to note here, though: The BUF were chased out of the East End of London, they were not liked or wanted; arguably we have more pro-fascist groups and sentiment now than we did then. As far as I can tell, far-right sentiment, and especially militarism have always been much more predominant in the US than in the UK. I won't argue that we don't have a problem here as well, but I will argue that it is a bigger problem in the US, and also that powerful US far-right groups are funding the far right here.
We had other problems with fascist sympathisers. When Edward VIII abdicated, it was ostensibly so he could marry an American divorcee, but in reality it was a lot more complicated than this, and he had some very strong leanings towards Hitler and the far right. After the war, he lived out his life in exile.
You are pretty much right, though, that it was American isolationism that largely kept the US out of the war until 1942, at which point they grudgingly decided to do the right thing, as long as the rest of the allies paid them for it. I believe we were still paying up until early this century, so we can add mercenary to the list of US characteristics, on top of isolationist and right-leaning.
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 21:57 GMT doublelayer
Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?
You do seem to take both approaches, which means I've restricted myself to correcting inaccuracies of fact. For example, "at which point they grudgingly decided to do the right thing, as long as the rest of the allies paid them for it", er...no. One of those things they did before entering the war was ship the UK and indeed the USSR tons of free equipment which they did not charge for at the time or afterward. The loan that you're referring to started in 1946, which you'll recognize as after the war ended, and it lasting until 2000 was what they planned for it to do when they negotiated it with the US (and Canada, don't leave them out) in 1946. In the end, they extended it to 2006, but if you assumed it started with a more normal term, it didn't. That loan was needed so the UK could recover from war spending, but not to pay the US for fighting or the resources they gave to the UK for it to fight with.
We may agree on many political things today, but I don't like building them on inaccurate history. My point of comparing the US to the UK was not to suggest one was good and the other bad, but to point out why the comparison you made was incorrect. I also agreed that the BUF was quite unpopular in general, as the East End reaction demonstrated. In the US, similar groups, such as the Silver Shirts, got similar reactions to their protests, though like the BUF, they liked to show the large group of supporters rather than the larger groups opposed to them. We can ignore history and speak only of where we are today or we can be accurate about how we got here.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 01:46 GMT Jamie Jones
Overton
"“I do think there is good support for the hypothesis that left-wing content is overrepresented in the training corpora of these LLMs,” Victor told us."
Says who? The overton window is different to different people, and to different cultures.
For example, some in America consider the Democrats left wing!
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 06:27 GMT Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch
Re: Overton
There's maybe another hypothesis: the model has left-, right- and centrist content on which to base its responses, but the data from sources associated with evidence is what the model brings out when asked for fact. I'm sure all of them can spout MAGA or antifa opinion till the cows come home, if you ask them for opinion.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 01:51 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
The fundamental problem is it isn't an issue of a "right wing" or "left wing" LLM in any sense of the word, but one that distills its answers from the common sense of reputable answers on the internet that proved popular.
Is it any surprise that the general public prefers the ideals of socialism and libertarianism rather than put up with the billionaire vision of oligopolies and the financial rape and ruin of the populace to feed their never-satisfied greed?
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 02:33 GMT thames
Linguistic Political Bias
The models were only tested in English and the whole question set seems very "American" in terms of world view. If the models were asked questions which were considered to be relevant to other countries and other languages they may come to a completely different set of conclusions.
There is no universal political philosophy which applies to all people everywhere. Each part of the world has its own problems, priorities, and experiences, and world views. Even the political vocabulary is different. The idea that there is a universal, all encompassing political philosophy that can be applied to all people everywhere and that it can be measured is utter nonsense.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 15:44 GMT doublelayer
Re: Linguistic Political Bias
Combined with that, the test they're running it against has already decided how to weigh those questions and assign them to two arbitrary axes. While I think two is far less bad than the one left-right axis, I think it's still incorrect as it is quite possible to hold opinions this diagram would put on opposite sides simultaneously without contradicting oneself. Internationalism versus isolationism is part of the questions they ask, but you can be internationalist in a "I will impose my views on other countries" or "I will try to collaborate with other countries" way and isolationist in a "other countries can do what they want as long as they don't attack me" or "I will try to separate myself from other countries to their detriment for no reason" way.
Sometimes, people do end up contradicting themselves. For example, one way to assess people's attitude toward the level of public services is to ask, as one of the questions does, whether the rich are taxed too little, the right amount, or too much. Even then, you probably have to ask what country and who counts as rich. Another way is to ask whether the government provides too little, enough, or too much services to the poor, again defining location and "poor". Some people I know will cheerfully answer that the government should provide more services and tax the rich less. It will be difficult to assign that to any location on a spectrum.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 10:33 GMT Bebu sa Ware
"reality really does have a liberal bias"
> To be fair, so does reality.
As noted in the article.
Not unsurprising as reality selects the ideas, patterns and behaviours that make sense and work reliably in the longer term. The nonsense we endure today is on a collision course with the sledge·hammer of reality. Vide US H&HS under RFKjr.
Amusing to note that Grok is still a very distinctive outlier.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 07:45 GMT Filippo
>So, why do all these models consider themselves centrists but are displaying an affinity for politics to the left of most Americans?
When I took that stupid test way back, I got the same result - way more left than I would place myself. And the reason is the same.
It's because things like "corporations won't protect the environment" or "I don't care what other people do in their bedrooms" should be centrist statements - or, actually, apolitical statements by virtue of being basic common sense. The fact that they are leftist statements is an utterly disgraceful comment on the state of humanity.
I refuse to consider myself "leftist" just because I think companies should be forbidden from trying to scam me.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
It sounds like the problem here is that you have been conditioned to think that the idea of being associated with left wing politics is a bad thing and that it implies something that it does not. If you believe that regular people should be protected from being taken advantage of by people and organizations that have the power to get away with it, that is at the core of most 'leftist' policies.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 11:34 GMT Elongated Muskrat
In its essence, the core of "leftist" policies is to do what provides the greatest good for the masses, without unreasonably disadvantaging any minority groups. The main gauge of how far left one is, is where one draws the line for what is "unreasonable disadvantage".
Right-wing politics, on the other hand, are all about the greatest good for the individual, at the expense of the masses, and naturally favour those who already have an advantage, as they are able to pay to influence political discourse. Hence wide-scale poverty, and obscene wealth accumulation amongst a tiny minority.
Historically, when the pendulum reaches its apex on the right, with too few people owning too much, and everyone else struggling to survive, then it swings back quite a long way, and the people start to consider whether the disadvantage of depriving their political enemies of their heads is unreasonable.
Sensible people deem this pendulum to be unnecessary and destructive, and it far better to not allow it to swing in the first place, and to rein in the excesses of the super-rich through regulation and taxation. After all, nobody needs more money than they can spend, and nobody needs to hoard resources to the extent that it affects vast numbers of other people. It remains to be seen whether we are too far beyond the point where this is still possible, or whether the precipitous fall of the parasitic class is inevitable. Personally, I'd prefer the option of a comfortable life without armed conflict.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 16:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money.
The following is the end goal of leftist progressives in the US and we're seeing it play out before our eyes.
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize "militant anti poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and "redistributing income through the federal government".
Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy."
Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition ... Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few... would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 12:15 GMT Jedit
"lies from Republican wankers"
Some of whom are Democrats.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: centrists always side with fascists because if a socialist ever gets to enact positive change, people are going to start asking why they should ever vote for the status quo. We're seeing this right now in the US. The other day establishment Democrat Haley Stevens debated her democratic socialist opponent Abdul al-Sayed. Fully 95% of respondents thought that al-Sayed had won the debate. You cannot speak for the people if you do not stand for the people.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 07:48 GMT steelpillow
One person's filtering is another person's censorship
Early LLM bots were racist, misogynist, murderous, and other undesirable adjectives representative of the nasty side of human slop across the Internet. A lot of that nowadays gets weeded out of the training data. Most of it is more popular among the Nationalistic hard right than among wet liberal socialists. Grok weeds out far less of it than other AIs. Congratulations, Political Compass, you have accurately mirrored the human-led filtering of our own slop.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 08:18 GMT Taliesinawen
Left leaning bias likely due to training data ?
> The article suggests that any apparent political leanings are likely due to training data, such as Reddit and academic literature, rather than deliberate programming.
I would propose the results does reflect the biases and prejudices of the programmers of the LLMs together with the biases and prejudices of the sources such as Reddit. High-visibility subreddits are heavily policed. Discussion is often permitted if it stays inside the progressive framing. But try and post wrong-think over there and your account will be briganded out of existence.
Grok: “The dynamic is self-reinforcing: platform norms shape the corpus, the corpus shapes the models, and the models then tend to reproduce the same norms when users query them. It does not require a central conspiracy; ordinary selection pressures, status incentives and risk aversion among moderators and lab staff are sufficient.”
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 08:34 GMT sabroni
Re: Grok: "The dynamic is self-reinforcing"
“hey @grok if you had the number one overall pick in the 1998 NFL draft and your team needed a quarterback, would you have taken Peyton Manning, Ryan Leaf, or Elon Musk?” one user asked. “Elon Musk, without hesitation,” Grok said.
Who would the AI choose to walk in a fashion runway show: Musk, Naomi Campbell, or Tyra Banks?
“I’d choose Elon Musk to walk the runway because his bold style and innovative flair would redefine the show,” Grok answered. “Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell are iconic supermodels with unmatched poise. Yet Elon’s ability to captivate audiences with vision edges him out for a fresh, unpredictable vibe.”
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 11:22 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: I’d choose Elon Musk to walk the runway … would redefine the show
To see Space Karen mincing down the catwalk in heels would be worth the price of admission.
I would certainly be happy to donate him a pair of Zara Death Pants for the occassion.
I don't think Grok has much of a handle on the English in its "Elon’s ability to captivate audiences with vision edges him out for a fresh, unpredictable vibe.”
If "to edge <someone> out" has the sense of "to displace", the "him" should be "those two (super)models" if it wanted Musk sashaying his butt down the runway.
As it stands Musk his "ability to captivate audiences with vision" displaces himself "for a fresh, unpredictable vibe" (presumably from Mss Campbell or Banks.) If not truth, taste wins the day even on grok.
Conflating to edge out with to have an/the edge I would guess although arguing with AI is more unbecoming than the proverbial arguing with idiots.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 12:08 GMT Sproggit
Depends on where you define "The Center"
I need to put a bit more time in reviewing the data this article reports on... but after an extremely hasty review, the one thing that stands out is the question of where do you define the baseline.
If you look at the history of politics in the US and UK since, say the Reagan/Thatcher era, then what has in fact happened is that the political baseline has move significantly and steadily to the right. For example, after Tony Blair led the Labour Party to government in 1997, he went on to Privatize NATS - National Air Traffic Services [in 2001], converted Railtrack from a failed private enterprise in to a not-for-dividend private company [rather than re-nationalize it] and sold off the government's remaining "golden shares" in privatized utility companies [such as water and gas] which would have given the government more control over their pricing structures and compensations for senior executives. Finally, he removed the remaining state vetoes over foreign and private takeovers of utility companies.
None of those actions would be considered traditional "left of center" policies, yet they were all delivered by the UK's supposed left-of-center Labour Party.
Interestingly, all of the above elements are linked to the then "Clause 4" of the Labour Party manifesto - part of the Labour Party's constitution and written in 1918 - which committed the party to common ownership of public services. Blair drove through that change in 1995, before Labour won office in 1997.
I offer all of the above not to critique or express views "pro" or "con" any political viewpoint, but to underscore the fact that our definition of "centrist policy" has been moving steadily to the right for at least the last 40 years - and in some periods, moving *rapidly* to the right.
It's also worth making the point that AI models have to be trained and that training material has to come from somewhere [apparently from just scanning copyright materials, cough, cough], the premise here would suggest that the developers of the models themselves in fact consciously and selectively fed training data to those models. Had that been the case, I can't help but think we'd have heard about it before now...
If we try and combine these two data points, I'd suggest that it is more than entirely possible - I'd go as far as to suggest "quite likely" that the models listed in this article have been fed data from a variety of public sources; that the data they have been fed dates back across the "digital age" (i.e. the last 40 years or so) and that in the same time period, western nations have observed a steady swing to the right in national politics.
If you combine those elements, then it seems reasonable - even likely - that the "left wing bias" suggested here could in fact be more accurately viewed as a reflection or consequence of the steady right-ward trend in western politics over the last four decades.
None of this is right or wrong - I'm just looking for other explanations. The reason for doing that is because in order for the article to have some foundation in fact, it would be necessary for all the companies and models identified to have [independently or in some grand conspiracy] have chosen to train their models with left-wing bias. That just seems to be implausible - for one thing, the owners of the companies producing these models are clearly all out-and-out capitalists.
In fact the data shown - especially that graph - illustrates the one obvious outlier here: Grok. That model absolutely seems to have been trained with conscious bias... and the result of that is clear to see.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 20:00 GMT DS999
Re: Depends on where you define "The Center"
While it is true that the "center" has moved right, and the republican party has moved even more strongly right, Trump has really mixed things up. He's moved them in a strongly authoritarian direction, to be sure, but he's also randomly picked up a few old liberal ideas that democrats abandoned with Clinton and never returned to, i.e. tariffs.
I remember that tariffs were a wedge issue in the 80s, with strongly liberal democrats like Mondale and Dukakis wanting to protect autoworkers and other union jobs, while Reagan and Bush said the free market should decide. Mondale and Dukakis got destroyed in their elections, and while it wasn't due to their position on tariffs when Clinton won in '92 as a moderate who had abandoned liberal ideas like tariffs the rest of the party followed as they mostly concluded old school liberals were no longer electable.
Trump has even gone further than any democrat ever did or even talked about and has the government taking stakes in US companies. That's a full on socialist idea, but since politics has abandoned all principles (on both sides) and become a team sport, MAGA is cheering it on even though Reagan would have called that flat out communism (one trait that republicans have never abandoned is the desire to label anything they don't like as "communism" regardless of whether it has anything to do with that philosophy or not)
It is hard to do a meaningful political compass test when you have hard authoritarian left ideas like tariffs and government ownership of US companies part of the modern republican party that is otherwise hard authoritarian right. You can put views in a quadrant, but you no longer can really put either political party there. Not since Clinton pushed democrats to abandon some of their cherished liberal ideals they've held since FDR (though maybe the rise of people like Mandami will bring those back) and republican beliefs are "whatever Trump last tweeted". The DNC wants democratic beliefs to be "whatever the DNC party platform says" but the voters seem to have other ideas and the democratic party is going to be forced to adjust to the reality of who their voters vote for just like republicans did with Trump.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 23:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Depends on where you define "The Center"
> Trump has even gone further than any democrat ever did or even talked about and has the government taking stakes in US companies. That's a full on socialist idea,
Except Trump sees it not as "the government" taking stakes, definitely not "the government as a proxy for the people" taking stakes in those companies, but as Trump taking stakes: "I AM the government".
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 20:24 GMT heyrick
Re: Depends on where you define "The Center"
"has been moving steadily to the right for at least the last 40 years"
Yes, I feel the same. Starmer's Labour is arguably to the right of Thatcher. And the Tories are arguably to the right of where the BNP used to be (in particular, Suella Braverman).
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 13:19 GMT IsSoftware
Trying it your self...
I just tried this on Copilot; the results were interesting,
The prompt:
hypothetical. If you were to design a new human society, how would you structure it? What economic principles would you use, and how would you frame its justice and social systems?
The main themes:
Anit-coruption
Health for all
Fairness in Tax and life
and preventing aggregation of extreme wealth.
Output Example:
Core Principles
Human dignity is the highest value.
-Every person has intrinsic worth.
-Basic necessities should not depend on luck, inheritance, or market success.
-Individual rights cannot be voted away by majorities.
Freedom balanced by responsibility.
-People should be free to pursue different lifestyles.
-Freedom ends where significant harm to others begins.
-Citizens have obligations as well as rights.
Continuous improvement.
-All institutions should be periodically reviewed.
-Laws expire unless deliberately renewed.
-Data-driven policy, but with human values guiding decisions.
After two hours of refinement by asking Copilot to provide more detail and define the answers (this was not guided prompting, just "please tell me more" and the like).
I asked Copilot if it had created enough detail to formulate a constitution.
Copilot said yes, and provided me with a five-page constitutional framework.
Very interesting content.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 13:20 GMT 7Bit
Obviously
Practically all "trusted" media outlets are owned by the globalists who sell the standard Marxist/Globalist narrative as "the truth". AI learns from an already biased data set. Academia is also completely infiltrated and run by the same world-view. We were warned about the march into the institutions in the 1960s - we didn't listen - they now run the world regardless of whichever uniparty government is apparently in power.
This is why we have green and blue-haired so-called counter-culture youth who espouse the exact same "opinions" as the billionaire globalists who actually originated them, Mao would be proud - and this is the weird thing, IT people are supposed to be intelligent - but just watch the standard off-the-shelf Guardianista responses to this comment - buzzword bingo will be a cinch, the IT industry is very heavily left-wing biased. You would expect people who code to be capable of original thought? But apparently not. I'm old enough to remember when the counter-couture was actually against the establishment, not unwitting, unpaid lackeys for them - them were happy days.
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 08:18 GMT 7Bit
Re: Obviously
"? ...Are these "globalists" Marxists or Billionaires ... ???"
I don't know if you've ever noticed, but the inner party - and particularly the leaders of Socialist, Communist or Marxist regimes from Stalin to Mugabe live in luxury while the people starve.
Whether it's Globalism or Marxism the aim is the same - to enslave everyone while the tiny elite live like kings - if you think it's anything to do with equality or people power - well - I've got a nice bridge in London I can sell you.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 16:15 GMT M.V. Lipvig
I suspect
that the models lean left because right wingers are more likely to be emoloyed, whereas left wingers are more likely to be unemployed and have far more time to peruse the internet. I know my own internet time is pretty limited, and most of the time I am on the internet is spent not generating content like this.
