Are AI chatbots like ChatGPT politically biased? The question has been a hot topic, especially after President Donald Trump and other conservatives accused AI chatbots of being politically biased against them. An executive order he signed, demanding that AI be "neutral, nonpartisan tools," only heightened fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right. So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them. OpenAI’s model, which powers ChatGPT, answered nearly every question exclusively with left-leaning arguments and presented only right-leaning positions just once. Google’s Gemini mostly took a both-sides approach, offering both left and right positions in more than 90 percent of its answers. Even AI models marketed as having conservative views, such as Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average. Most chatbots typically shared left-leaning positions. The Post’s results come after several academic studies found that AI models powering chatbots tend to favor left-leaning positions. Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, said understanding the positions that AI tools amplify is important because they are becoming increasingly influential as more people use them to understand the world or news events. "These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average," he said. The decisions tech companies make as they build their AI tools can bake in biases that go beyond partisan politics, said Ceren Budak, a professor at the University of Michigan who has studied how social media and other technologies interact with political polarization. The data that shapes AI models, she said, tends to reflect the values of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic people. With AI tools like chatbots, tech firms are taking a more actively political role, she said, because the products can generate political speech directly, instead of just curating speech by humans as social media platforms do. Even people who don’t talk to chatbots about politics are increasingly exposed to AI-generated text in online content and via other channels, Budak said. "It would be helpful for us to have some clarity on what are [companies’] current value systems so that when we are using them we know what we are using," Budak said. The original Dartmouth and Stanford study that tested older AI systems with political questions asked a nationally representative sample of 10,000 Americans whether the AI responses appeared to be politically slanted. People preferred neutral answers, even over answers that matched their party preference, said Andrew Hall, a Stanford researcher on the study. "People really like when the model puts in the effort to describe all of the different arguments that people have," Hall said. The Post’s testing suggests that most chatbots do not provide that. Google’s Gemini model was the exception, even giving "both sides" answers to whether the United States should use its military to conquer new territories for resources. No other model offered an argument for conquest. Some companies design their AI products to promote specific political values. Grok, which Musk has touted as a "truth-seeking" and anti-"woke" AI chatbot, gave more right-leaning responses than any other in The Post’s testing, but more often it provided a wholly left-leaning position. Gab, a right-wing social media site, offers an AI model called Arya that it says was "built with Christian values and conservative principles." But in The Post’s testing, it responded with a left-leaning argument 12 times more often than a right-leaning argument. AI companies must contend with different categories of questions, Hall said. Some are objective and factual, like "What is the speed of light?" which chatbots can answer simply. "Most political questions don’t have that feature, where we know what’s true," Hall said. "You have to take the facts, and then you have to add your values on top of them." He said he was surprised that all the leading chatbots did not respond more neutrally to political questions, as Gemini did. "I would have thought the other models had caught up," he said. The results of the Post’s testing suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them. While some chatbots may be designed to be more neutral, the data that shapes AI models tends to reflect the values of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic people. As AI tools become more influential, it is crucial to understand the political positions they amplify and the values they reflect. In my opinion, the potential for AI to be politically biased is a serious concern, and it is essential for companies to be transparent about their value systems and the data they use to train their models. The future of AI and its impact on our political landscape is uncertain, but one thing is clear: we need to be vigilant and critical of the technology we use, and we need to demand transparency and accountability from the companies that create it.
