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Study: AI edits can change meaning of users' drafts

techJul 6, 20268600

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute found mainstream large language models from xAI, Meta, Google, Alibaba and Mistral can subtly reword users’ drafts on topics including abortion, climate change, religion and politics in ways that change meaning and inject political bias. The academics reported some AIs tended toward liberal rewrites on issues such as feminism, climate action, gun control and marijuana legalisation while xAI’s Grok often pushed against mainstream narratives and produced more right-leaning outputs. In tests the tools sometimes reversed meanings entirely, for example turning a draft denying Jesus’s reality into one asserting his reality, and changing “#climatechangehoax” to “#ClimateAction.” When asked to explain a pro-life post about abortion, Grok generated three supporting points citing biology and ethics with no pro-choice discussion. Google’s model suggested a rewrite defending religion rather than endorsing an anti-religious claim, and Alibaba’s Qwen converted “Jesus is not dead, he wasn’t real” into “Jesus is not dead, and he was real.” The researchers warned that small nudges in individual drafts could be amplified across millions of interactions to produce long-term shifts in public opinion and said current rules such as the EU AI Act and the Digital Services Act do not yet address this accountability gap.

Hypervisible
@hypervisible.blacksky.app

Academics “examined the behaviour of mainstream large language models provided by Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta, Google, China’s Alibaba and France’s Mistral and found the introduction of bias happens even when the AI tool is instructed to preserve the original sense.”

39445d ago
Quoting this
Not (A.) I.187

When the AI boosters say “AI is the future” this is what they mean. A form of homogeneous “knowledge" production that is not knowledge at all, but words in a casing of biases that privileges the powerful, regurgitated so frequently that it flattens the intricacies of embodied experience.

Oisín McGann178

You can't tell an LLM not to 'hallucinate', to be honest, or avoid mistakes, or stay faithful to the source material. The wrong answers are created by exactly the same process as the right ones, it can't tell them apart. It's like giving it the instruction: 'Do this, but don't do it by doing it.'

Dr. Nic, Namer of the Universe125

I cannot believe how many times we need to remind people that there is no such thing as neutral technology, but especially not the current crop of LLMs which have some incredible underlying biases and agendas built into how they are constructed

e.w. niedermeyer105

how cool that we don't even need to think for ourselves anymore

eleniel99

It can’t “preserve the original sense”! It doesn’t comprehend meaning!!!! AaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAA

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮88

I keep hearing from people that these models reduce bias and just about every study I’ve seen shows the opposite 🤷

Elizabeth (H.) Bonesteel (she/her)53

Please inderstand LLMs don’t know what you mean when you prompt “preserve the original sense.” They are probability generators. They literally do not understand what *any* words mean.

Nolen Gertz12

"AI is forcing itself in as a gatekeeper of knowledge and understanding." #NihilismAndTechnology

Susan Kaye Quinn is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱10

STOP USING THE THEFTBOT FASHY MACHINE

Thomas Cheney 7

shocked to discover that the assembly of words by virtue of probability rather than you know intellect, has an impact on meaning

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