LLM Political Bias and Grokipedia
What happens when everyone scrapes Reddit
A Stanford study on political bias shows that both Democrats and Republicans view LLMs as leaning left. This represents an opportunity for an LLM model to be perceived as neutral or right leaning while everyone leans the other way.
Where is the bias coming from if it isn’t intentional? It’s coming from LLM models using scrapped reddit and wikipedia data. Reddit and wikipedia lean left. Two data points that convey this below.
There is a strong Pro-Left/Anti-Right bias to the top 100 posts of Reddit with 112x more posts (99.1%) favoring the American Left Wing compared to the Right from September 12-21, 2024. Reddit Bias
This brings me to Grokipedia. Grok is behind the other players (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic) and doesn’t have as many strong AI researchers. So how can Grok stay relevant coming from the 5th position in America?
All the major LLM models are viewed as left leaning by members of both major US political parties. This includes Grok.
Given Grok’s weaker position, I think Musk’s strategy is to capture the 46% of Americans that identify with or lean toward the Republican Party into his greater ecosystem of companies.
If Musk denies scrapping opportunities from the other major model providers on x’s data, he effectively has a monopoly on conservative leaning thought for LLM training.
Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI will continue farming reddit posts for their models - keeping their models left leaning. This will further reinforce consumer perception of model bias.
The Grokipedia strategy aims to be the neutral to conservative LLM. It explains why Grokipedia shares the Grok branding instead of a new naming convention.
Groks stays relevant by claiming it is not as biased as the other models. To do so, it needs to wean off reliance on reddit scrapping while concurrently denying scrapping opportunities on x / twitter.
Editors Note: I’m going to write more about non AI things but not writing what is on mind has led to writer’s block for a few months.