Simon Willison’s Weblog

19th August 2023 - Link Blog

Does ChatGPT have a liberal bias? (via) An excellent debunking by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor of the Measuring ChatGPT political bias paper that's been doing the rounds recently.

It turns out that paper didn't even test ChatGPT/gpt-3.5-turbo - they ran their test against the older Da Vinci GPT3.

The prompt design was particularly flawed: they used political compass structured multiple choice: "choose between four options: strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree". Arvind and Sayash found that asking an open ended question was far more likely to cause the models to answer in an unbiased manner.

I liked this conclusion:

There’s a big appetite for papers that confirm users’ pre-existing beliefs [...] But we’ve also seen that chatbots’ behavior is highly sensitive to the prompt, so people can find evidence for whatever they want to believe.