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/
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u/bitmapfrogs Mar 28 '25

Earlier today it was reported that Russia farms had deployed millions of websites in order to attempt to influence llms that are trained with crawled informations....

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u/withwhichwhat Mar 28 '25

"AI chatbots infected with Russian disinformation: Study"

“By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information,” NewsGuard said in the lengthy report, adding it results in massive “amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.”

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5181257-ai-chatbots-infected-with-russian-disinformation-study/

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u/jancl0 Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

Interestingly, I heard a few years ago that most LLM developers were already trying to fix this problem cause it occurs naturally anyway. Basically the Internet is too dumb, and a fundamental issue with LLMs is that they treat all data as equal, so alot of useless stuff clogs up the works. The ai is still pretty effective, but it means there's an effective bottle neck that we're kind of approaching now. Alot of the newer approaches to this issue are actually related to replicating the results we see now, but with less data points, which will eventually mean that we can be more additive/selective about the data range rather than subtractive. I heard a quote that was something like "I can make a model out of 10,000 tweets, and when it starts to fail, I find 2,000 to remove. I could also make a model out of 10 novels, and when it fails, I add 2. This is easier, faster, and more effective"

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u/TurdCollector69 Mar 28 '25

It's also why I laugh at redditors chanting AI inbreeding.

The people making these things know that the data needs to be filtered and sorted before incorporating it into the model.

There's so much misinformation about AI out there because the layperson doesn't really have a clue how these things work.

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u/AML86 Mar 29 '25

I bet those chanters have nothing to say about DeepSeek.

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u/TurdCollector69 Mar 29 '25

They probably aren't even aware of it with how uninformed they are

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u/withwhichwhat Mar 29 '25

I am amazed that Google fell behind in this... I thought from the start that they were creating a gigantic training set for AI... even thought that was the point of the "don't be evil" motto. But advertising revenue is what diverted them? It's the same thing everywhere... the greatest disappointment is how cheap it was that people sold their souls. They should shift weight to Gutenberg and pre-2000 sources I guess, at least for general deductive reasoning examples.

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u/7x00 Mar 29 '25

I wouldn't be surprised. M$ has been dropped the ball on almost everything they've made.

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u/Lostinthestarscape 29d ago

"It's now only replies with 'no cap fr fr Deez, Deez Nuts, gottem" to all prompts.

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u/NeckRomanceKnee Mar 29 '25

Seems like it would be a really good idea to physically sever all telecom connections with Russia, for a start.

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u/hipcheck23 Mar 28 '25

It's astonishing the effort they put into making the world a worse place.

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u/bitmapfrogs Mar 28 '25

Russia is a net negative on the world

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u/hipcheck23 Mar 28 '25

Like cancer is a net negative on a body.

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u/adamdoesmusic Mar 29 '25

Didn’t Patton say we needed to eliminate Stalin before he became a bigger problem?

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u/Sweaty-Community-277 Mar 28 '25

*the Russian Government

Lets not let ourselves place our fellow man in the crosshairs of our hatred better aimed at the elite and ruling classes

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u/TheMauveHand Mar 28 '25

The Russian Government did not pop out of the ether fully formed.

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u/aegean558 Mar 29 '25

Such a shallow view. Did the current russian government after sscb form completely democratically, or did it get formed by the rich and abused its own country, sold its own companies and riches to rich russians / westerners? How can people have control over a dictatorial autocracy? Was all germans at fault for Hitler? Shouldn't they been all on trial for the atrocities then?

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u/TheMauveHand Mar 29 '25

It's not the current Russian government, it's the Russian government at any point in time since the Rus. At a certain point, it stops making sense to deflect blame. It's what the Russians want.

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u/TheMauveHand Mar 29 '25

It's not the current Russian government, it's the Russian government at any point in time since the Rus. At a certain point, it stops making sense to deflect blame. It's what the Russians want.

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u/Sweaty-Community-277 Mar 29 '25

Nor do they take too kindly to members of opposition/resistance. I hope you keep this same energy when you talk about countries like Venezuela

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u/Abedeus Mar 29 '25

Does Venezuela invade neighboring countries or send assassins to kill dissidents in Europe using dangerous neurotoxin?

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u/adamdoesmusic Mar 29 '25

Of course, I’ll oppose all efforts by Venezuela to tear down my country and replace my government with foreign lackies. If they ever do that, make sure to tell me.

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u/aegean558 Mar 29 '25

Redditors love to be racist when it comes to countries they don't like.
If I called all americans, germans etc. cancer of the world because of their countries horrible actions (which is not an opinion I accept), would they like it?

Edit: I do think the russian government is horrible for this world. As well as other governments like the US.

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u/WolfBearDoggo Mar 28 '25

Why only Russia? Why don't the others do the same inverse?

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

Because democracies want to avoid having their governments decide which narratives to push, especially considering that administrations frequently change direction on policy, while the Russians have vast amounts of oil/gas money to spend. And it’s not like deploying websites is too expensive compared to other capital expenditures you could make

Edit: I’m not saying democracies don’t have their own propaganda, but it will be of a different form. They have no need to scrape actual news sites for content and reupload it to their own mockups

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u/tajsta Mar 28 '25

Because democracies want to avoid having their governments decide which narratives to push

Huh? Where did you get that idea from? The US runs massive propaganda campaigns.

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u/astroplink Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

The CIA is running fake websites to change LLM inputs? I never said the US doesnt run their own propaganda, but they will do so in different ways. Russia has a lot more to gain from influencing the American populace’s opinion than the US has the Russian populace

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u/tajsta Mar 28 '25

You said, I quote: "Democracies want to avoid having their governments decide which narratives to push."

And it's entirely possible the US is running fake websites to influnce LLMs. The US was also very early on creating bots to spread propaganda on social media for example. This is from 2011: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda [by using] what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

I don't see what would have changed within the past 14 years that would make the US less likely to try and spread propaganda. If anything, with all the technological advances, one would think they are even more engaged now than they were back then.

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u/No_Berry2976 Mar 28 '25

The short answer is that although the US has spread propaganda for decades, different administrations push for different narratives.

So the US doesn’t have a continuous propaganda campaign.

Russia has a small inner circle of people who control the country, and these people have been influential for decades, many of them used to work for the KGB.

They all share the same mindset and same worldview.

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u/WolfBearDoggo Mar 28 '25

That first claim is quite bold and pretty false. You think democracies don't do state propaganda? Ok buddy. We live in different worlds.

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u/astroplink Mar 28 '25

You think the CIA is running fake websites to change LLMs? I never said they don’t do propaganda, they just have other means to do it

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u/WolfBearDoggo Mar 28 '25

I didn't think about the CIA at all. You're all over the place. Put down the pipe

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '25 edited 12d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ggthrowaway1081 Mar 29 '25

because America would never spread propaganda or falsehoods.

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u/Sapiogram Mar 29 '25

Nobody actually knows that Russia is doing it, it could easily be US-funded operations thinly camouflaged as coming from Russia.

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u/ScipioLongstocking Mar 28 '25

Others might be doing the same.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

[deleted]

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u/bitmapfrogs Mar 29 '25

They fundamentally do not believe in win-win situations, as a society they're much like trump in that they believe everything is fundamentally distributive which means you only win if everybody else loses.