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Comment by chrysoprace | Hacker News Reader

LLMs can be injected with biases as well. Just look at Grok's responses any time it's tagged in anything mildly political.

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That’s like saying journalism is not useful because journalists are biased.

Bias is useful and inevitable

Bad journalists are biased. Good journalists will present a story as factually as possible and as void of bias as possible (of course it's impossible to not have any biases). Opinion pieces can have as much bias as they like as long as they're strictly marked as opinions.

That's not true. Any journalist would tell you that picking the stories you chose to cover is just as much a bias as how you chose to cover them. Even then, the specific words you pick, how you ask the interviewees, how you place the story on the page, what you pick as the "related stories". All of that is Editorial and reflects an opinion.

Good journalists are open about their angle. Bad journalists tell you they are "unbiased" and "just bringing you the facts".

In the case of publications we luckily have such fantastic resources as mediabiasfactcheck[0] to keep their bias in check and to keep them factual.

LLMs are much harder to fact-check because they can make anything up based on their training data and weights without sources.

[0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com

And biased journalism is still useful and informational.

I mean yeah, it's Grok. They had to work really hard to get their preferred levels of political bias in there.

Any examples of political bias?

Apart from calling itself "Mecha Hitler" and that time it made every conversation be about "white genocide" in South Africa?

There's also Grokipedia, supposedly make by Grok, where I'd point to section 3.6 ("Controversial topics"): https://arxiv.org/html/2511.09685v1

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