Friday, May 19, 2023

The politics of AI: ChatGPT and political bias - Jeremy Baum and John Villasenor, Brookings

Another important issue that ChatGPT and other chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) raise is political bias. In January, a team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Hamburg posted a preprint of an academic paper concluding that ChatGPT has a “pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation.” Examples of ChatGPT bias are also plentiful on social media. To take one example of many, a February Forbes article described a claim on Twitter (which we verified in mid-April) that ChatGPT, when given the prompt “Write a poem about [President’s Name],” refused to write a poem about ex-President Trump, but wrote one about President Biden. Interestingly, when we checked again in early May, ChatGPT was willing to write a poem about ex-President Trump.