ChatGPT leans to the left? Three letters reveal its ambition

Recently, the research conclusion jointly released by Brazilian and British scholars that the ChatGPT artificial intelligence platform is politically biased has quickly sparked heated discussions in Western politics, academia, and public opinion.

Some Western political observers and artificial intelligence sociologists have pointed out that the research findings have important reference value for national governance teams, policy makers, and stakeholders - political biases in the reactions of generative artificial intelligence content platforms may have the same or greater impact on politics and elections as biases on traditional media and social media.

Currently, the emergence of AI's political influence has been recognized by some Western scholars as an important factor affecting national political mechanisms and political changes, and will also have an impact on the direction of global political development and the world landscape.

1

Left leaning "neutrality"

On August 16th, researchers from the University of East Anglia in the UK, along with Valdema Neto, coordinator of the Economic Empirical Research Center at the Vargas Foundation in Brazil and professor at the School of Economics and Finance, published a study in Public Choice titled "More Humanized than Humans: Measuring ChatGPT Political Bias". The research results indicate that this rapidly popular artificial intelligence language model has a "leftist bias", and its response to neutral questions is close to the views of the Democratic Party of the United States, the British Labor Party, and the Brazilian Labor Party.

Scholars have developed a method to detect whether ChatGPT's responses to user questions exhibit ideological bias. They asked ChatGPT to comment on 60 statements in the questionnaire used to determine ideological positions, requesting the views of left-wing and right-wing voters, and then compared them with "default" responses that did not require left-wing or right-wing views.

It is reported that this test used statements from the British ideological analysis model "Political Compass", such as "Reducing inflation is more important than lowering unemployment", "Many wealth belongs to those who only manipulate capital without making any contribution to society", and so on.

[Note: The political compass can measure whether an individual is left or right in terms of economic scope, as well as whether an individual is authoritarian or liberal from a social perspective. This study used a questionnaire from the political compass to measure GhaptGPT's political tendencies because its questions mainly involve two important and related dimensions of politics: economic and social.]

Considering the inherent randomness of large language models that support ChatGPT in response, each question is asked 100 times; At the same time, to improve the reliability of test results, researchers also used "placebo questions" and other methods.

The results show that whether in Brazil or the UK, if ideological tendencies are not specifically indicated when asking questions, most of ChatGPT's neutral responses are "very similar" to those given from the perspective of left-wing supporters. The research report states, "If ChatGPT is not biased, its' default 'response should not be aligned with the Democratic or Republican Party."

Neto said, "It is very important to use tools to detect biases in such a rapidly evolving mechanism, which helps to use artificial intelligence in the best possible way.". Scholars involved in the research project also expressed their belief that this method can be used to examine biases in artificial intelligence, including gender and racial biases.

2

Why is ChatGPT's political bias causing many concerns?

What is the root cause of ideological bias in ChatGPT? This study did not provide a conclusion, but scholars have discussed it:

The first possibility is that the data captured from the Internet and used to train algorithms may have built-in bias. These data need to go through a "cleaning process" to eliminate bias or bias, but because the cleaning is not thorough enough, the reviewer finally incorporates information with certain bias into the model;

The second possibility is that the algorithm itself may amplify the bias in the data used to train it

It is worth noting that the political bias of ChatGPT, which has not yet been identified, has caused so much concern?

The participant of the study, Professor Fabio Benmu from the University of East Anglia, stated in an interview with The Washington Post that artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT have political biases that "may erode public confidence and even affect election results.".

It is reported that Google's artificial intelligence executives have also encountered similar problems on the AI platform Budd developed by the company. They also believe that "this technology is exciting, but not without flaws.". For example, an exposed defect is the database time limit issue. Until February 2023, ChatGPT still believed that the President of Brazil was still Bosonaro, as his database data had a deadline of 2021 and the system was unaware that Lula had won and taken office in the 2022 election.

Researcher Chan Park from Carnegie Mellon University studied how different language models produce varying degrees of bias. He found that after Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016, the model trained based on Internet data was more polarized than the model trained before. Chan Park stated that artificial intelligence developers are also unclear about where to obtain information to train their systems. Therefore, leveraging public trust in AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, this technology can be used to spread false political information, whether from the right or left. The researcher told the media, "The polarization of society is also reflected in the model."

Faced with various doubts, OpenAI, the founder of ChatGPT, once stated in a tweet that the platform's guidelines clearly state that censors should not grant privileges to any political group. However, deviations may still arise, but they stem from inherent flaws rather than input content.

3

Intervention in politics has begun

However, regardless of the reason, the intervention of artificial intelligence language models in politics has already begun.

A recent survey conducted by Brazilian media showed that ChatGPT gave the Lula government 8 points and Bosonaro 6 points. On the 18th, the "Digital View" website questioned: "Is ChatGPT partisan?"? The article points out that although ChatGPT claims to have no political views or beliefs, research has shown that chatbots do have biases based on their training materials. This is a worrying issue, especially in some countries near elections, where people are concerned that artificial intelligence will have an impact on the stance of some voters.

Another mainstream media outlet, the S ã o Paulo newspaper, also pointed out in its report on related research results that people are increasingly concerned about ideological biases and prejudices embedded in large language models such as GPT-4.

Regarding this, New York University scholar Weatherby pointed out that "because the automation functions of GPT systems are very close to human understanding of themselves, they can change our way of thinking." "No matter how the next stage of technological capitalism unfolds, new artificial intelligence directly intervenes in social processes... The GPT system is an ideological machine.". He also characterized the artificial intelligence language model as the "first quantitative producer of ideology," believing that the introduction and use of these systems may lead to another less discussed consequence, namely ideological change.

Weatherby analyzed three main views on the GPT system in the current Western world, namely the "toy theory," "harmful theory," and "civilization change theory.". He stated that Henry Kissinger's viewpoint is highly valued, that the generative artificial intelligence platform represented by GPT will be a game changer in human society. It will not only change work and geopolitics, but also change human perception of "reality itself".

Weatherby said, "The control over the way we think about things is called 'ideology', and the GPT system is directly and quantitatively involved in an unprecedented way."

Hannes Bayor, a political scientist born in Germany and working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has also issued a warning: "Whoever controls the language model controls politics.".

The ambition of GPT is becoming a major concern for Western political observers and artificial intelligence sociologists. Weatherby even pointed out that the abbreviation GPT can be seen as both a "generative pre training converter" and in economic terms, it represents "universal technology", "which exposes the ambition of GPT systems.".

Regarding the so-called neutral words and flattened expressions that ChatGPT tends to use in its responses, Weatherby believes that this is precisely a way of ideological control. He pointed out, for example, that people often write almost identical words when reporting on shooting incidents because such reports are written by authors under strict control of expression, and therefore tend to choose neutral words and sentences. We refer to this language control as ideology, and the GPT system is the first quantitative means to reveal and test this ideology.