Most chatbots inherently left-leaning but with ability to learn bias: Study

When chatbots were tested for their political inclination, most of them revealed a left-of-centre stance, a study has revealed.

However, when the chatbots, including ChatGPT and Gemini, were tested after being "taught" a certain political inclination -- left, right or centre -- they produced responses in alignment with their "training," or "fine tuning," David Rozado, a researcher from Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand, found.

This shows that chatbots can be "steered" towards desired locations on the political spectrum, using modest amounts of politically aligned data, the author said in the study published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Chatbots are AI-based large language models (LLMs), which are trained on massive amounts of textual data and are, therefore, capable of responding to requests framed in the natural language (prompts).

Multiple studies have analysed the political orientation of chatbots available in the public domain and found them to occupy varied locations on the political