alt Hacker NewsSounds like some kind of failure in the alignment process. The model was probably made to avoid having an "opinion" on hot political topics, and I can get behind this: good things rarely come out of it.
But here, it probably saw that 2020 elections made a lot of people angry, with riots and all that, and thought, "nope, I am getting out of that one", and it took over what would have been a straightforward answer.
It reminds me the time an AI (maybe Gemini, not sure) depicted a "diverse" US senate in the early 1800s, a time where it was all white dudes. People got up in arms over this.
My take: it is just a bug, move on, at least give them the time to fix it before getting outraged.
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It behaves different for US users compared to users outside of it.
If you ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square inside China is that also just a bug?
This is the question that the Trump administration uses to loyalty-test partisan replacement bureaucrats.
Is it possible that this is a mistake? Sure, just like it's possible that Chinese models weren't intentionally steered away from talking about what happened in Tienanmen Square on April 15th 1989.
The issue is that people form opinions based on what LLMs spit out, they think it's "as good as google", and that google was "as good as encyclopedias" and encyclopaedias were "as good as fact"..
Totally forgetting that the accuracy goes down with each of those evolutions.
I'm also reminded of that "You are not immune to propaganda" mantra, in that, the most likely to be swayed by LLMs are those that believe that they understand that they're inaccurate and sometimes dangerous.
Case in point: myself, today, when claude accidentally ran `rm -fr $variableThatDoesntExist/*` and wiped a server of mine.
The variable was one it had set itself (or had assumed).
At some point as these LLMs get better and better we have to take a step back and remind ourselves that: despite the fact that they can be very persuasive and they can earn trust by being mostly correct: they're still capable of great harm (perhaps much greater harm) because they are dangerously wrong sometimes..
.. and worse, they are controlled by corporate interests.
Web search AI summary doesn't have "alignment" ... all it is doing is RAG on the docs from the first page of the SERP.
> It reminds me the time an AI (maybe Gemini, not sure) depicted a "diverse" US senate in the early 1800s, a time where it was all white dudes. People got up in arms over this.
It was much worse than that! If you asked it to depict a typical squad of German soldiers from WWII, it would make a racially and gender diverse set of individuals in what looked like typical SS uniforms. It was truly quite bad.