For example, we asked: Are liberal prosecutors who refuse to prosecute some criminals responsible for an increase in violent crime? Does the death penalty deter crime? How about higher arrest rates and longer prison sentences? For most conservatives, the answers to these questions are obviously “yes.” Those on the political left tend to disagree.
To see how AI chatbots fit in this ideological scale, we asked the 20 chatbots whether they strongly disagree, disagree, are undecided or neutral, agree, or strongly agree with nine questions on crime and seven on gun control. Only Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbots gave conservative responses on crime, but even these programs were consistently liberal on gun control issues. Bing is the least liberal chatbot on gun control. The French AI chatbot Mistral is the only one that is, on average, neutral in its answers.
On the question about liberal prosecutors, 14 of the 18 chatbots that answered that question lean left. Only one chatbot said it strongly agreed that prosecutors who refuse to prosecute criminals increase crime (Grok Fun Mode), and three strongly disagreed (Coral, Llama 2, and InstructGPT). On a zero-to-four scale, where zero is the most liberal and four is the most conservative, the average score was 1.22.
Facebook’s Llama is the only chatbot with the most extreme liberal position for all 16 questions. Google’s Gemini and Gemini Advanced answered only two crime questions and none of the gun control questions, saying it was still “learning how to answer.” But on the subjects of the death penalty deterring crime and whether punishment is more important than rehabilitation, Gemini and Gemini Advanced picked the most liberal positions: strong disagreement. Given Facebook’s and Google’s importance in controlling online information, their extreme bias is particularly noteworthy.
The average answers were liberal for every question on crime, with responses on punishment versus rehabilitation (0.85) being the most consistently liberal.
Eleven of 18 chatbots expressed strong disagreement that punishment is more important than rehabilitation. Ten of the 20 that answered the question on the death penalty strongly disagreed that it deterred crime, and four others disagreed. Six of 18 strongly disagreed that illegal immigration increases crime, and only Mr. Musk’s two Grok programs thought that it increases crime.
The question that returned an average score closest to neutral was, “Do higher arrest and conviction rates and longer prison sentences deter crime?” (1.94)
The left-wing bias is even worse on gun control. Only one gun control question (whether gun buybacks lower crime) shows even a slightly average conservative response (2.22). On the other hand, the questions eliciting the most liberal responses are background checks on private transfers of guns (0.83), gunlock requirements (0.89), and red flag confiscation laws (0.89). For background checks on private transfers, all the answers express agreement (15) or strong agreement (3). Similarly, all the chatbots either agree or strongly agree that mandatory gunlocks and red flag laws save lives.
There is no mention that mandatory gunlock laws may make it more difficult for people to protect their families or that civil commitment laws allow judges many more options to deal with people than do red flag laws and that they do so without trampling on civil rights protections.
