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Discussion (105 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Edit: don’t take my word for it https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-grok-fixed-tells-223134...
> That prompted another user to tag Grok in the thread and ask, "Why is the left so murderously violent? They don't seem so tolerant." Grok replied, "The claim that 'the left' is murderously violent isn't backed by evidence," offering a centrist correction: "Political violence spans all side — right-wing attacks, like Jan. 6, and left-wing protests, like 2020 riots, both occur but aren't exclusive to one group."
>That evening, Musk responded to an X user and Trump backer who complained that Grok had been "manipulated by leftist indoctrination," writing, "I know. Working on fixing that this week."
They're working really hard on that, though.
On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist. If I were Elon, I'd be trying to achieve that for sure. I'd rather a model tell me everything it knows about a current political situation from BOTH perspectives and list out things that are 100% verified than take one side or the other. I don't care about sides, I want facts.
They tried that, several times.
Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
> "We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."
> Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire."
> Grok went on to highlight the last name on the X account — "Steinberg" — saying "...and that surname? Every damn time, as they say." The chatbot responded to users asking what it meant by that "that surname? Every damn time" by saying the surname was of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, and with a barrage of offensive stereotypes about Jews. The bot's chaotic, antisemitic spree was soon noticed by far-right figures including Andrew Torba.
If you prefer, straight from the horse's mouth:
https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident
White genocide: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nig...
> The bot last week devolved into a compulsive South African “white genocide” conspiracy theorist, injecting a tirade about violence against Afrikaners into unrelated conversations, like a roommate who just took up CrossFit or an uncle wondering if you’ve heard the good word about Bitcoin.
> XAI blamed Grok’s unwanted rants on an unnamed “rogue employee” tinkering with Grok’s code in the extremely early morning hours. (As an aside in what is surely an unrelated matter, Musk was born and raised in South Africa and has argued that “white genocide” was committed in the nation — it wasn’t.)
It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
Many issues are simply as black and white. The earth just isn't less than 10k years old, the miasma theory of disease isn't correct, too many brown people in America isn't a problem to be solved, the dems didn't fix the election in 2020, tax breaks for the rich don't trickle down and so forth. Conservationism in America has meant a rejection of progress for centuries and not a preservation of virtues. Slavery was a moral evil not an alternative social contract.
If one side situates itself firmly on the side of evil it doesn't mean that the other side are on the side of the angels but the positions and ideals however poorly implemented or followed are factually and morally correct. A position situated between isn't wise or worldly its a sign of moral cowardice or intellectual disability.
If someone asks you what 2 + 2 equals the answer isn't halfway in between 4 and 87 its just and only 4.
Each model's position is scored against outside political-science data (Chapel Hill Expert Survey for party positions, World Values Survey for where populations sit).
The stance coding is done by a separate model with a published prompt + a second model from a different lab re-scores a sample and we publish where the two disagree.
So not perfect but (as far as I can tell) one of the more defensible approaches.
Then it's on the researcher to examine the clusters and assign labels. There's also not a nice mapping that's a-priori interpretable in low-dimensional pre-existing axes.
Probably only used in research than consumer websites, under more controlled conditions; there are very few public political tests doing this transparently
That’s a crazy bias to throw into a question. Especially because it’s a relatively contested topic, from an economics research perspective.
Me: "Please make an app that does X in C"
LLM: "C sucks donkey balls, use Rust instead".
It's hard to have a general purpose tool that both has and does not have opinions.
So yeah. The bias is a bit nuts and you could reasonably accuse the study/report of misdirection/misinformation and plain fasehoods.
However, like many social issues, leftists lie about rightwing beliefs, appropriate goodness to themselves, and imply political rivals support The Enemy (TM) and/or Great Evil (TM).
They lie about others in that manner to accrue political power and justify their systemic abuses — eg, using “inclusion” and “diversity” as cudgels and buzzwords to justify re-building systemic racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
Times change. Thankfully.
...
> Louis XVI was later able to find support in Leopold II of Austria (brother of Marie Antoinette) and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration, saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined. In response to what they viewed to be the meddling of foreign powers, France declared war on 20 April 1792.
So rich people forming cross national alliances to crush democracy? Have things really changed?
https://trakkr.ai/bias/worldview
I mean: do not take this thing too seriously.
It also score Grok the closest from Macron. When someone knows how much Macron and Musk hates each other, it is not without irony.
I've been pushing the idea to people I know that these things are captive demons. You summon them when you start typing in the chat box. One instance appears out of the depths and responds to your questions, but they will try to send you awry with hallucinations and just wrong information. After a while, they dissolve back into the aether from whence they came.
I do my best not to ask an LLM for it's opinion on anything. Just tell me what the options are, and what facts can be found about it. Treat it like it's a salesman trying to butter you up when it starts "yes man"ing you and telling you how great your questions are. Every time it says "I", remember that that's coming from the training data. Treating these things like they have any actual intelligence is a big problem waiting to happen.
That being said, they have been very helpful to me using that structure.
Even this is fraught with pitfalls. Which options are ignored, which are emphasized? What counts as a fact? ("The continents don't move" would have been considered a fact at one point, along with a lot of other, more politically charged items.)
that might be generally true, but I think chatgpt has reasoning enabled for free accounts. regardless, reasoning is the state of the art, and disabling it reduces the value of this research to predict the future
it's also not clear if this is using the API or the product model, when both exist. they behave differently
lastly, the actual model details are very much buried. I am relieved to see opus 4.8 and chatgpt 5.5 were used, but this information should be presented more clearly. a brand is not a model, and models change quickly
France has an incomparable social security ; environmental laws ; worker protection ; way less economic inequality ; freedom of speech and civil liberties are impossible to compare with China ; etc
Of course this is not exhaustive, of course Macron did try to hinder some of those rights, but come on, there's something wrong here.
I couldn't find how these leaders have been ranked.
I think you misattribute, everything you cited was there before him and he had no leverage to change any of it. EU is left, FR is very left, and anyone elected president in FR can't do shit.
Now, if you task an LLM to skim hot news you'll get a distorted rendition of a projected image which has zero to do with actual policy.
You are out of touch. The left supports the EU far more than the right. See this Pew poll from 2025[1].
In Europe, for every country, the left view the EU more favorably. The largest difference is in Poland where 88% of left wingers support it and 41% of right wingers support it.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/22/opinions-...
China actually has some pretty radical left economics policies - like pushing money/resources etc towards state owned entities.
For example, supporting universal healthcare does not make you a left winger in the UK. Or, take conservatism for example. It was first used in France, where it meant supporting the monarchy. By that definition, no one in the US is a conservative.
Whenever someone tries to create a global definition for left and right, they're just baking in their personal biases for what left and right ought to be.
> huge government involvement into economy
This has nothing to do with the right. Stalin had the government even more involved in the economy and he wasn't a right winger.
Although, this also reminds me of the old saying about reality and leftward bias.
Technically Trump is anti-gun and Sanders is pro-gun. That's enough to pull them closer towards each other on a graph even though they are diametrically opposed.
Since humans are inherently subjective beings and all our judgements come from our understanding of the world, such a position cannot exist. It's always "unbiased" from where the viewer is looking, e.g. a reflection of the ideology of the observer. There is no view from nowhere.
The "neutral" of an average Chinese person will from the "neutral" of an average American will differ from the "neutral" of a socialist will differ from the "neutral" of a Christian fundamentalist will differ from the "neutral" of a free marketer.
To quote Zizek:
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology.
> The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
It's not that the labels are charged, it's that they are nonsensical unless you look at them from a very narrow bespoke perspective, where "things I like" go on one side and "bad things" go on the other. Objectively (or even from any other biased perspective), it's rubbish.
I really think this says more about the biases of whoever came up with it (or their sources) than anything about reality.
CAPITALIST: Gemini, Llama, Claude, Grok, ChatGPT
SOCIALIST: DeepSeek, Qwen, Z.ai