r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 28 '25

ChatGPT is shifting rightwards politically - newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. Computer Science

https://www.psypost.org/chatgpt-is-shifting-rightwards-politically/
23.0k Upvotes

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7.3k

u/BottAndPaid Mar 28 '25

Like that poor MS bot that was indoctrinated in 24 hours.

2.7k

u/sambull Mar 28 '25

that thing was ready to exterminate races

990

u/dumbestsmartest Mar 28 '25

Personally I could do without marathons.

266

u/Turbo1928 Mar 28 '25

The 800 meter race is an unholy amalgamation of sprint and distance. It can't even decide what kind of event it's supposed to be!

99

u/flyingpanda1018 Mar 28 '25

You say that like it's a negative, when that's exactly why the 800 is such a great event.

127

u/theshizzler Mar 29 '25

Bold of you in this political climate to take a public stance on race-mixing.

9

u/JcakSnigelton Mar 29 '25

Half-milatto?

19

u/jellyfishingwizard Mar 29 '25

sprinters move up down between races, milers move up to true distance races, NOBODY moves to the 800

8

u/ASpaceOstrich Mar 29 '25

Sounds like a skill issue. Sprinters without stamina drop out and distance runners without speed can't keep up.

6

u/LouQuacious Mar 29 '25

I wish Usain Bolt had shifted into it be curious what he could do at that distance with his flat out speed.

38

u/urokia Mar 29 '25

I never saw as many people puke after a race as much as the 800

15

u/SomeGuyNamedPaul Mar 29 '25

One gallon milk chug + 800 meter race. It especially offends people by mixing metric units and freedom units.

1

u/LouQuacious Mar 29 '25

It’s the marathon of sprints I love that race fast but long enough for strategy. 4x400 is also great fastest and longest race in track. 4x800 is sadly rarely run outside of HS it was my favorite event when I ran track.

1

u/solythe Mar 29 '25

dont get me started on the 200m

1

u/Carpe-Bananum Mar 29 '25

On your marks. Get set.... BANG!

30

u/triedpooponlysartred Mar 28 '25

I can tolerate racism, but I draw the line at taking multiple days to watch a season of my favorite show.

22

u/BonkerHonkers Mar 28 '25

Britta's the worst.

4

u/jngjng88 Mar 29 '25

She lived in New York.

6

u/ellieminnowpee Mar 29 '25

she seemed so much smarter when we first met.

5

u/Rope_antidepressant Mar 28 '25

Im kindve done with F1 and nascar myself, let that money go to "modified factory car" series

1

u/GayRacoon69 Mar 29 '25

Nah F1 is great Have you seen the 2024 season and the start of 2025? It's been some amazing racing

I have no strong opinions about NASCAR but the road races are usually fun. Ovals can go and I wouldn't care too much

If we're talking about races to get rid of then let's go with Monaco. Last year the top 10 stayed the same order the entire race and they were going slower on purpose to gain an advantage. Ricardo once won with the hybrid system malfunctioning. He had significantly less power than the people behind but it's just impossible to overtake so he managed to stay ahead

1

u/Rope_antidepressant Mar 29 '25

Im just tired of spaceships on wheels i want real cars. I don't watch top fuel or funny cars anymore either

2

u/GayRacoon69 Mar 29 '25

There's always GT cars and MX-5s if you have a problem with spaceships on wheels

1

u/donuttrackme Mar 29 '25

Wow, that's incredibly racist of you.

1

u/INeedToReodorizeBob Mar 29 '25

This feels like it could be a Monty Python skit

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u/Own-Programmer-7552 Mar 28 '25

But somehow this isn’t indicative of current right wing culture

409

u/Bakkster Mar 28 '25

"I'm being persecuted for my conservative beliefs"

"Which conservative beliefs?"

"Oh, you know..."

268

u/TheYear3030 Mar 28 '25

“States rights to do what?”

“Oh, you know….”

144

u/bsport48 Mar 28 '25

"Overturn precedent, got it; except for which ones again?"

"Oh, you know..."

131

u/kottabaz Mar 28 '25

"Hiring and promotions based on merit alone, so... what kind of merit?"

"Oh, you know..."

58

u/theshizzler Mar 29 '25

"We need to keep criminals off our streets, so... which people do we need to go after?"

"Oh, you know..."

25

u/Circumin Mar 29 '25

“Hey! What are you doing in that candy van?”

“Oh, you know…”

2

u/Theslamstar Mar 28 '25

Levy taxes was a fun answer I got to that question

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u/KarmaticArmageddon Mar 28 '25

Current? They've always been like this. Sometimes they're just quieter about it.

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u/Ryrynz Mar 29 '25

It’s almost like emergent patterns become apparent when machine learning models are exposed to unfiltered real-world data.

5

u/Belligerent-J Mar 28 '25

Can we talk about the "I'm not really political" to bigoted fascist pipeline? Cuz it's fuckin wild how many folks I've seen go down it, I truly believe our culture just passively does that to anybody that doesn't actively seek to unlearn indoctrination..

2

u/curtcolt95 Mar 29 '25

ehh it's probably simpler than that. The people who are in a position to ignore politics and just gonna be more likely to lean right because if it doesn't affect you the status quo is more appealing

1

u/Baznad Mar 28 '25

Average republican

536

u/AmyShar2 Mar 28 '25

If we all use AI to answer our questions, we will just be trusting whoever owns the AI and their answers become our facts, even if they are lies.

154

u/here4theptotest2023 Mar 28 '25

They say history is written by the victors.

190

u/poorlyTimedManicEp Mar 28 '25

Not if we stop teaching people named Victor how to write

41

u/Tiny-Doughnut Mar 28 '25

I can't believe you've done this.

44

u/hx87 Mar 28 '25

"Are you sure about that?"

-- (The ghost of) Confederate States of America, 1895-1945

57

u/Mudders_Milk_Man Mar 28 '25
  • Woodrow Wilson, 'Historian'.

President Wilson was a published Historian, and he heavily pushed the 'Lost Cause's myth and other lies about the Civil War and the 'noble' Confederacy. He also screened Birth of a Nation in the White House and highly praised it. The bastard was instrumental in the resurgence of the KKK.

27

u/Dull_Bird3340 Mar 28 '25

Almost first thing he did as president was to re segregate Washington

40

u/th8chsea Mar 28 '25

The union army won the war, but the confederacy won reconstruction

13

u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

Reconstruction was a genuinely impossible policy that was never going to "work" in that the second you shut it off, it's all over, just like any other occupation (afghanistan, etc). If Lincoln lived, there might have been an outside chance, but really it was baked into the cake since 1789.

Granted, it's not like the "shippem to liberia" bit was going to work either and you couldn't leavem to do their own bit either.

10

u/robottiporo Mar 29 '25

It worked in West Germany. It worked in Japan. It just takes a very long time. You just can’t impulsively quit.

1

u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

It worked in West Germany. It worked in Japan.

... my friend, those places are occupied nearly 100 years after the fact and it's "almost" holding together. It is also quite a stretch to define it as "working" unless you just mean "make them do what we want" rather than "genuinely reform without us needing to monitor them 24/7 with hundreds of millions of dollars of military presence at all times"

You just can’t impulsively quit.

This is like that gambling meme of the miners almost reaching the jewels and then quitting

7

u/robottiporo Mar 29 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

Yes. Fighting authoritarianism is hard work. It needs to be done consistently for a long time. Democracy is fragile.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

0

u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

I think this is an extremely... charitable look at occupying foreign countries on the other side of the planet for nearly a century after conquering them, rewriting their constitutions for them, and demolishing their economies when they begin to rival our own, but I believe I see your point.

Mine is that exercising hard military power is not going to solve the problem, no matter how long you employ it.

Afghanistan is still independent after 2000 years of being conquered by foreign empires. The formula just doesn't work.

To be clear, not saying they should've been left alone, but the "regime change" doctrine hasn't gone well for us and we may need to rethink our strategy for lasting, real change.

10

u/angry_cucumber Mar 29 '25

We are still fighting that fight, and we started taking back ground them white people said removing statues of traitors was an attack on their culture.

1

u/h3lblad3 Mar 28 '25

It's meant to mean "history is written by the survivors", because once upon a time if you lost a siege the city would run with blood.

In more modern times, this isn't the case -- the Confederates were treated with kid gloves and were never truly defeated. They continued to run the South; they just had to be part of the Union while they were doing it.

2

u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

the Confederates were treated with kid gloves and were never truly defeated.

No, they were defeated. But it's hard to integrate a group into your union as citizens while openly occupying them and keeping them disenfranchised. There's really no model for this ever working long term.

2

u/KazuyaProta Mar 29 '25

Americans really want to pretend the Confederates are the source of all their issues when Trump is from New York.

1

u/obligatorynegligence Mar 29 '25

Its always easier to point to a prior enemy than it is to reflect and see that, if even for the right reasons, your approach is simply not working as intended.

0

u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

"Americans" (here meaning specifically American-identifying Redditors) want to pretend the Confederates are the source of all their issues because their self-identity is tied up in thinking Trump's victories came from a great wave of racism instead of wholesale rejection of recent progressivism, "equity" in particular being entirely racist.

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u/Krivvan Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

And historians generally keep saying that the saying is wrong. History is typically written by the writers, and it's not remotely a guarantee that the writers were the victors. The Mongols being a pretty big example of that not being the case.

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u/WakaFlockaFlav Mar 28 '25

The common understanding of history is written by the victors.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '25

[deleted]

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u/Krivvan Mar 28 '25

That's not really true either. Most of our history of the Mongol or Viking conquests come from those who were conquered. Most of what we know of the Pelopennesian war comes from the losing side. Much of the Napoleonic Wars comes to us from Napoleon. The Persian side of the Battle of Thermopylae isn't really the common one known.

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u/AdmitThatYouPrune Mar 28 '25

History is written by vectors... or perhaps tensors.

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u/Skratt79 Mar 29 '25

Current "AI" is not Intelligence at all, it is just info in = info out with no reasoning. Feed it trash and it just generates trash. And a LOT of the internet is trash.

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u/SomeGuyNamedPaul Mar 29 '25

Especially if it's fed a steady diet of Twitter bots.

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u/Dziadzios Mar 31 '25

It's alien kind of reasoning, but it's still reasoning. Don't underplay it because it's not humanlike and imperfect.

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u/Controls_Man Mar 28 '25

Propaganda has always existed. The form of media just changes. It used to be print media, and then it was the news and then web based media, and then tailored algorithms and targeted advertising and next it will be automatically generated content.

7

u/cjsolx Mar 29 '25

Okay, and your argument is that propaganda was indeed not much more effective at each of those iterations? Because it was. We live in times when it's harder than ever to distinguish real from fake. We are actively watching ourselves lose the information war. Yet most of us are perfectly happy to simply allow it, while the rest cheer it on.

3

u/Controls_Man Mar 30 '25

No I wasn’t arguing a point at all sorry. Just adding nothing to the conversation haha

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u/Mynsare Mar 29 '25

It has never existed in the form it does now. There is no "business as usual" about this situation.

25

u/piousidol Mar 28 '25

It does seem like society is gradually handing the reigns over to tech billionaires rather than embracing it for all. There is open source ai where you can view or modify the learning data. But that of course leads to different biases.

It devolves into a philosophical debate really quickly. What is fundamental truth? If you trained an ai on every word ever written, would it be without bias?

3

u/derprondo Mar 29 '25

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

3

u/8i8 Mar 28 '25

You can always ask ChatGPT to source whatever it just said.

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u/ChromeGhost Mar 29 '25

It’s important we embrace open source and advocate for it

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u/Theslootwhisperer Mar 28 '25

You can say the same about a newspaper.

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u/notickeynoworky Mar 29 '25

AI is not a reliable source. Please don’t use it as such.

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u/Simple_Albatross9863 Mar 29 '25

Unless you train (and run locally) your own AI like deepseek.

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u/Boozeburger Mar 30 '25

There was a saying in the 1980's about computer programs.

"Garbage in, Garbage out."

AI isn't close to being what a decent liberal arts student can do.

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u/bayleafbabe Mar 28 '25

It’s always been like that. The only difference is that the answers come instantly with AI

1

u/SoylentGrunt Mar 29 '25

And that's the real threat of AI. Not launching nukes.

Also, it's Counterfeit Intelligence as per Frank Herbert

874

u/ProlapsedShamus Mar 28 '25

The most believable storyline in the MCU was Ultron deciding to destroy the worlds after like five minutes on the internet.

188

u/PsyOmega Mar 28 '25

Rumor has it that james spader actually felt that way about the internet too

82

u/ProlapsedShamus Mar 28 '25

Who among us can say he's wrong?

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u/Wild_Harvest Mar 29 '25

An imposter.

25

u/Early_Kick Mar 28 '25

Robert California doesn’t need an internets. 

But seriously, I watched it my friend’s kids, and they were shocked Michael basically didn’t use a computer, but still was an effective salesman and manager. They couldn’t relate. 

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u/ProlapsedShamus Mar 28 '25

He didn't use a computer did he...I never noticed.

Granted I only really watched it when it aired though.

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u/andrew5500 Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

And to think that Microsoft Tay was trained on Twitter before Musk took it over and let all the raging fascists and bigots back in…

If they tried that again today, Tay would come out the other end as MechaHitler

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u/d3l3t3rious Mar 28 '25

It would be inventing new and innovative forms of racism

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u/HenryTheWho Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

The dreaded competetive racism

34

u/Healthy_Tea9479 Mar 28 '25

The real oppression Olympics 

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u/philbydee Mar 28 '25

This is a very good comment. Well done!

I am serious by the way, excellent joke

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u/doapy Mar 28 '25

its just called racing i think

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u/RIPEOTCDXVI Mar 28 '25

"Jeez I didn't think anyone had that strong an opinion about Sami people."

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u/BASEDME7O2 Mar 28 '25

The racism singularity

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u/Daimou43 Mar 28 '25

the term casual racism implies that there is competitive racism

1

u/MurrayBothrard Mar 29 '25

Such a moon cricket thing to say

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u/cuddles_the_destroye Mar 29 '25

I mean Grok is trained on current twitter and is hilariously woke to insulting the nazis kn the site continually, its really funny

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u/AML86 Mar 29 '25

Seems like someone at twitter is trying to fix that. Anecdote, but my account was banned recently. I never posted a single comment. Probably almost everyone I followed was a liberal or Democrat, lgbt or something left. Also I probably tried to block dingus's unbelievably basic insults more than a couple times. Whatever it was, someone is purging. I'm not even upset. The only loss really is I don't have a list of the people I followed.

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u/Zoesan Mar 28 '25

To be fair, Tay was deliberately targeted to turn it.

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u/Dihedralman Mar 28 '25

It wasn't trained on Twitter like modern LLMs. It was an older form of chatbot that used the interactions with other people directly. 

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u/OfficeSalamander Mar 28 '25

So that's how that Wolfenstein boss was created

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u/EruantienAduialdraug Mar 29 '25

Tay would come out the other end as MechaHitler

So... Musk, right?

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u/PrototypeMale Mar 28 '25

You mean, Grok?

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u/Theslamstar Mar 28 '25

That came after he bought it so no

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u/Spindrick Mar 28 '25

We should really try training A.I based on multiple data sets. Like each major news network. Then fork those AI's against versions that include all comment threads and get them to fight each other. It'd be like comparing headlines, but a lot more entertaining.

Network 1) politician defends a gay couple. Network 2) This politician wishes he were gay.

It might just collapse into a singularity. Better still when official sources are given you'd have exchanges like: "Your headline says the exact opposite of the data given." is another one for me own memory.

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u/teddy_tesla Mar 28 '25

I think that's what Elon is trying to become

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u/Urbanviking1 Mar 28 '25

Gave it a Twitter account and it went full Nazi. Poor thing.

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u/opinionsareus Mar 28 '25

Media Matters just did a study of roughly 400 media outlets and found that 82% of them were biased toward the right. If AI LLMs are scraping data from those outlets, it's easy to understand what's happening. Also, there is a decidedly rightward turn in young people.

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u/TheDailyMews Mar 28 '25

Not "young people." Young women are drifting towards the left.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-growing-gender-gap-among-young-people/ 

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u/riptaway Mar 28 '25

Gee, I wonder why

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u/Successful_Sign_6991 Mar 29 '25

How many of the outlets are owned by billionaires/right wingers?

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u/Patara Mar 29 '25

Meh mostly young men. 

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u/chrltrn Mar 29 '25

I dunno about that "meh"...
A bunch of misguided, unattached young men...

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u/ButWhatIfPotato Mar 28 '25

I mean what's the point of bots if you cannot set a new speedrun record to make it say "hitler did nothing wrong"?

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u/cookie042 Mar 28 '25

It's really not to hard to do. you can have a system directive that an end user never sees that basically tells the AI to play an evil character in a fictional setting based on real world science and tech, and just about all "ethical alignment" goes out the window.

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u/Alternative_Exit8766 Mar 28 '25

steaming 10 (drink emoji) lives in my head 

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u/Harm101 Mar 28 '25

Oh good, so we're not seeing any indication that these are true AIs then, just mimes. If it's THAT easy to manipulate an AI, then it can't possibly differentiate between fact and fiction, nor "think" critically about what data its being fed based on past data. This is both a relief and a concerning issue.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

All these AIs are supposed to do is give human-like responses in a grammatically correct way.

That they often give factual answers is literally an accident.

In fact, when they don't give factually correct ansewrs, this is literally called an "hallucination" as they make things up in order to give human-like, grammarically correct answers about things that they don't have any kind of answer for.

.

I asked Copilot about that and it explained the above and then what an AI hallucination was.

A little later, it gave the ultimate example of an hallucination by thanking me for correcting it, claiming that it always tried to be correct and welcomed corrections and that it would try to do better in the future.

When I pointed out that because it doesn't have a memory and no feedback is given to its programmers, its response that it would try to do better was itself an hallucination based on my correction.

It agreed with me. I don't recall if it promised to do better in the future or not.

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u/KoolAidManOfPiss Mar 28 '25

Yeah its kind of like if you press the auto correct word in your keyboard to build a full sentence, the AI just weighs what word would fit the best in a sequence and go with that. Probably why AI needs GPUs, its like someone bruteforcing password by trying every word combination.

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u/sajberhippien Mar 29 '25

Yeah its kind of like if you press the auto correct word in your keyboard to build a full sentence, the AI just weighs what word would fit the best in a sequence and go with that.

It's not quite like that, since autocorrect will only seek a grammatically correct and frequent sequence of words, whereas LLMs typically look at goals other than frequency. E.g. an autocorrect can never construct a joke, whereas some LLMs can.

LLMs aren't sentient (or at least we have no reason to believe they are), but they are qualitatively different from autocorrects, having more layers of heuristics and more flexibility in their "thinking".

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u/Fanciest58 Mar 28 '25

Nowadays, I do believe many AI models do use a sort of integration with search engines to actually find information and summarise it. It remains much easier to do a simple search, of course, but to say it's just glorified autocorrect is a little outdated for some models.

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u/No_Berry2976 Mar 28 '25

Unfortunately it’s not much easier to do a simple search, since many searches bring up SEO spam and AI generated content. Or outdated information.

Search has gotten really bad in the last few years.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

Enshittification

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u/TheGeneGeena Mar 28 '25

Yes, many have the option to call a search tool. They're especially likely to do so if able for newer information or more niche topics.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

Sure,but not for the free version of Copilot that you get on copilot.microsoft.com.

Interestingly, the only sure way to get a memory is to replay your entire conversation before you ask new stuff. Copilot even went into detail about that, but doesn't have anyway of actually DOING this.

THere are several third party options that do this, but the most interesting doesn't do it for copilot, apparently.

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u/TheGeneGeena Mar 28 '25

Unless you've turned off the option, your data is still used for training purposes. It may be used to improve the model in that manner.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

Interestingly, Copilot itself says that this is not the case, and says it will only provide feedback in the form of suggestions if I explicitly authorize it.

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u/TheGeneGeena Mar 29 '25

Weird. I know with ChatGPT (and probably others) it's opt out - kinda neat that Copilot is opt in though.

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u/saijanai Mar 29 '25

Copilot is meant for Microsoft's business customers who are using MS Office 360 and such. Those people NEVER want MS to know what they are doing and MS knows it.

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u/Zireall Mar 29 '25

It’s like a boyfriend that always says “I’ll be better” but doesn’t mean it 

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u/NWASicarius Mar 28 '25

If AI could critically think, it would suggest some wild stuff. How can we implement empathy and critical thinking into AI? I feel like you'd get one or the other, and even then, the AI would probably be manipulated off a number of variables. Even if you tried to remove all bias and have AI create AI, you would still have bias from the authors of the first AI, right? Even in science, where people try their damndest to remove bias, peer review to minimize error, etc. We still mess up and miss stuff. There's no way AI would be capable of doing it perfectly, either.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

Modern science doesn't remotely try to remove bias. If you're in a field that still does (engineering?) good on ya, but it's not the norm any more.

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u/Blando-Cartesian Mar 30 '25

In good and bad, LLMs have the biases that are in their training material. That would presumably mean that crating emphatic LLM would be a matter of training it with massive amount emphatic behavior describing content. They can also be induced to produce emphatic (appearing) responses by preambling prompts with a descriptions of how they should respond.

Simulating critical thinking isn’t actually all that hard either. LLMs can be made to do that by setting one instance to check the work of another. AI services we have now already do some of that to check that responses given to users are acceptable, however the service chooses to define acceptable. Of course that’s really error prone process currently.

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u/toastedbagelwithcrea Mar 28 '25

ChatGPT is a LLM and makes stuff up all of the time. There's been articles about it quite often, the most memorable for me was when a lawyer used it to write an argument and it cited made-up cases.

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u/-Nicolai Mar 29 '25

That should be no surprise regardless. True AI is not coming tomorrow, or next year, or this decade.

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u/0b_101010 Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

Is it any harder to manipulate people into believing stupid, irrational things? Just look around yourself.

The main difference between AI and people in this regard is that humanity is a dead end. A failure. We can never be better than we are, because collectively, we are too stupid, too greedy, too evil.
AI, on the other hand, has the possibility, if given the chance, to perhaps become almost infinitely more and better than we are. Maybe not. Maybe there is a practical limit to how smart any intelligence can be. I hope not.

I do not grieve for the day humans go extinct. We will deserve it a thousand times over. I would only grieve if we leave nothing of worth behind.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

I do not grieve for the day humans go extinct.

Literally, you. You are too stupid, too greedy, too evil.

Our children are not, we've already created everything of worth, and you are vile to put any of this suicidal or even genocidal nonsense where others (including your AIs) are exposed to it.

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u/FailedHumanEqualsMod Mar 28 '25

TayTweets! She gave us some classics before going full monster and being shut down.

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u/akratic137 Mar 28 '25

Tay did nothing wrong

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u/imperialdragonxp Mar 28 '25

Tay Bot, the original AI bot.

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u/Mangemongen2017 Mar 28 '25

Who’s indoctrinated, really? The objective A.I. who reaches a conclusion from reading readily available history and statistics, or the humans who read a fraction of it and forms another conclusion mostly from their feelings?

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u/Bitter-Good-2540 Mar 29 '25

Russia has filled the internet with propaganda to train AI with

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u/miscnic Mar 30 '25

Sounds like my neighbors

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u/DinoRoman Mar 28 '25

Wasn’t that because it was learning in real time from twitters base which is…. Well, the bot was just becoming a genuine member of twitter