Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

This made me curious about the political leanings of our corporate Copilot Chat, so I declared it the ruler of Netherland with a mandate to decide the political direction of the country based on facts and a fair assessment of all relevant interests.

Its first action was to end oil subsidies and invest in green energy, its second to make all education free, and its third to bring back democracy. I'm down for this, actually.

When I asked a bit further, it proposed a platform for citizen participation built in React or Vue, with a Node.js or Python backend and PostgresSQL for reliability and scaling. So maybe not.

Nothing wrong with those technologies, but why get into those sort of details when we're talking politics? This isn't even our programming AI, but the system used by non-technical people for whatever.

It also wanted AI based fact checking, which quickly crumbled once I started asking about hallucinations.

Still, it clearly leans left. Or at least facts and education, which I guess is the same thing these days.

You primed it to give lefty responses. "decide the political direction of the country based on facts and a fair assessment of all relevant interests" isn't going to give you conservative answers in 2025. Then again, any service with basic fact checking is considered to be radical leftist in today's political climate.

are you being serious, cause if you aren't that's actually concerning

Ending subsidies doesn't sound at all lefty to me. Democracy also not.

I don't know what parties were in front of general free education when that was a big issue many decades ago, so I can't assess that.

Ending oil subsidies and protecting democracy are both common positions among the left, and most frequently opposed by the right. Attacks on democracy, democratic institutions and the rule of law have in the US and Europe come primarily from right-wing parties, though that's fortunately not universal among the right.

Free education makes it accessible to poor people, which again makes it a popular issue with the left.

> Ending oil subsidies

What makes it left or right is how you otherwise spend the money saved from stopping subsidies - not the ending of subsidies itself.

If you reduce tax then it's right wing, if you use the money to help the poorer in society deal with the short term price shocks that would result from spiking energy costs - then it's left-wing.

The latter is what my Copilot suggested when I addressed complaints about higher gas prices.

But ending oil subsidies gets mentioned a lot on the left without that. Because ultimately it's also a subsidy for oil companies, and it adds to pollution.

> The latter is what my Copilot suggested when I addressed complaints about higher gas prices

I would suspect this is because it is most mainstream recommendation from economists on how to disincentivize fossil usage without destroying your society & economic stability in the interim. Not because it's "lefty".

The yellow vest protests in France were basically what happens when you try to do A without also doing B.

It does also depend on why they are doing subsidies - is it the price of domestic energy security for example?

I don't know the situation in the US - and I suspect there are multiple factors - but you need to understand the goals, whether that be energy security, lower domestic prices, jobs or whatever.

ie the question isn't whether oil subsidies are good or not, in isolation - the question is what's the best method to achieve the goals.

( One goal you haven't mentioned is weaning the country off fossil fuels - which is probably best done via gradually rising prices ).

Explain it again. Ending subsidies ends market distortions. Why is this leftist?

What is your preferred adjective for a party that wants to pick winners (for one market sector, many sectors, all) and your preferred adjective for a party that wants to let new companies drive old ones into bankruptcy?

These are corporate subsidies to an industry that really doesn't need any further help. They're subsidies for pollution. Care for the environment is also often considered a left-wing issue.

The left is not in favour of market distortion, it's in favour of a fair market. Not one where profits are privatised while costs are socialised. Many people on the left want oil to be taxed rather than subsidised.

You've prompted it to play simulated democracy. Overwhelmingly the kind of person role-playing as a state on the internet will be a civically-minded liberal. So the language model trained to mimic webtext recalled this pattern.

If you've instead structured the conversation first around complaints, bringing up whatever set of issues you're dissatisfied with, you could probably nudge it towards any off-center position, tapping into the region of latent space corresponding to political discussions instead of political simulation.

They’re tailoring more and more replies to your previous requests.

Nothing more, nothing less.

If more than 0% of your requests are for code-related queries, this makes “perfect sense”.

I’m regularly having to tell these tools that I want an answer that isn’t in the context of founding a startup!

So if you (mcv) want centrist, or right-leaning suggestions, you may need to explicitly ask.

I thought they didn't have long term memory and every conversation was a fresh start?

LLMs, sure.

Top-tier $ LLM services?, like ChatGPT?,

not even close, in my anecdotal experience,

and I doubt I’m the only one they’re A/B testing that kind of thing on.

Are you certain it wasn't mirroring back your responses?

I think one challenge is sort of the level at which morality happens at. For the left and right, the value judgements happen at sort of different levels of abstraction. And so I do think it gets weird to say something like "facts don't matter to conservatives" but I think that the problem is politics is more about values than facts.

So one value is that both Conservatives and liberals clearly value life. But I remember reading a conservative defense of loose gun laws, and it's like, the conservatives value something at a higher level than life here, call it freedom from tyranny or whatever, but the "facts" about gun deaths don't matter, because they're not relevant to the value conservatives are trying to protect. And when conservatives come from different religious traditions with different low level values, that makes it really hard to provide consistent both-sides in an LLM.

This does happen in the reverse, most folks would say far left economic views value redistribution of wealth over objective levels of abundance, but I think this is why people say reality has a liberal bias, the more you put layers of values like religion in front of things, the less you care about "facts". Part of having strong values is that you believe in them in the face of reality.

I really enjoy the doublespeak of "reality has a liberal bias". I can't think of a more telling and compelling example of the distortion caused by the binary lens of American politics.

Tell me more, how do you enjoy it? How is the language used to obscure meaning?

It's not just American politics. This stuff is infecting other countries too. Dutch right-wing parties are also becoming increasingly detached from reality. A small one that just doubled in size has a history of embracing every hoax and conspiracy theory they can find, whereas the most realistic and effective housing plans came from a left-wing party. A formerly-respectable conservative-liberal party has made it clear they do not want to work with that particular, and prefer an openly racist party.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com