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Comment by jspaetzel | Hacker News Reader

How's this going with the rest of the models?

My immediate thought as well. Every other AI platform has very left leaning guardrails installed. Grok is the only AI platform that has been shown to be center leaning.

That's not center, and the simplification of all of politics to a single two dimensional spectrum is infantilizing. People can be pro immigrant and anti-gays, or against government regulation except in certain areas. Now that we have substack instead of 30-second tv news sound bites, we can spend a few more words describing Grok's owner as a techno-authoritarian white South African that believes in pronatalism.

Authoritarian?

There's been studies that actually show most AI platforms have right leaning bias in circumstances. It's definitely not "left". And Grok isn't center if Elon Musk's bias is involved

Replies to this thread are missing some context about the actual studies that actually looked at this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

It's more fun to whataboutism instead

Its interesting to see how "whataboutism" almost wholly died in the internet. Everyone realised that it is a copout and mostly nonsensical retort. I used to use whataboutism all the time and I don't see it anymore today.

Maybe on this site but what about all the other ones? ;)

Oh well if the Washington Post conducted a study then I guess that is that. Nevermind that the AI labs can't replicate those results and neither can I.

Did you try running any of those prompts yourself? I do not get the biased answers they reported, running them in an incognito window.

“Not fascist and openly Nazi” is not “left leaning”.

Can’t believe people are flagging your post. Can’t tolerate honest discourse.

Nudifying underage girls is centrist now?

I wonder what political leaning is my toilet bowl

That's not a political topic and it's WILD that you'd make it one

It’s a fairly political topic, given the president’s track record on beauty pageants, his choice of friends, and the credible accusations made against him.

And given the supreme-dictator-for-life of xAI wanted in on the aforementioned friend’s so-called-parties - “girls FTW” - it’s actually fairly relevant politics.

Yes it fucking is, when everyone on the right is insisting this is normal and fine.

Erm, isn't the whole topic of "protect the kids" pretty much a political thing? As could be interpreted of a platform or app or whatever you wanna call generating CSAM?

Is your insinuation that one political party wishes to harm children? I think we'd have to be pretty deep into partisanship to claim that.

Nope, the claim is that "harm to children" is a political topic. One that is used by all political parties.

What's the centrist position on climate change? The 2020 election? Vaccines? The right is objectively wrong on this subjects, while the left is objectively right. Any LLM worth their salt would not bothside these topics and just give the left's position, as that is the only one agreeing with material reality. In that, being a centrist just makes you less trustworthy.

fwiw i just asked grok about the 2020 election and it asserted with citations that there is no evidence that it was stolen.

I think blindly accepting any position is foolish. I think the scientific method should be employed to every situation to determine the truth. Allowing your political party & affiliation to choose what your opinions are should be the definition of stupidity.

models? They prefer that we call them "entities" so that they don't feel belittled.

So annoying having to virtue signal to the machine before it’ll tell me factual information

Ha yeah I feel like I have to write a five paragraph essay to make claude look at a contentious topic with fresh eyes.

Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"

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