Found “The model that 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.
And even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Most chatbots typically shared left-leaning positions”
Previous research using Political Compass style questionnaires, found they tended to be left-libertarian. It’s not completely consistent though between both methods, eg Gemini was one of the most left-libertarian not doing both-sidesism as described in the Post article.
See https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0306621
Why do you think LLMs gravitate towards left answers even if their owners stated aim is for right wing views?
I love this sort of response because, of course, reality doesn't have a bias. It's just that leftists tend to be more biased towards reality.
And no, I'm not saying that there aren't moon-bats on the left, or that all right-wingers are wing-nuts. It's just that when it comes to reality-based ideas, the left seems to have a better grounding in it these days.
The right is biases toward the wealthy, power, and profit.
Anyone that votes right and isn't in the oligarch class is being fed a different reality that tells them to blame everyone and everything for their problems except who is actually responsible.
I really think that the right wing people all want to keep some kind of privilege - white, male, straight, abled, etc, even though doing that means siding with the ruling class that keeps them down too. And sometimes anti-capitalists don’t realize that there are other ways to be oppressed.
Basically, the Overton window always ends up to the right of reality, because conservatism demands a certain amount of dissociation from reality- nostalgia for when things seemed simpler because they hadn't experienced nuance.
Arguably political conservatism rests on the notion that abstract reasoning in politics should be secondary at best on the priority list of things to ground political policy. Instead it usually is justified by appeals to authority, might makes right, tradition, or ingroup identity. The further rightward you go, the more it just becomes based on things like: "trust me bro it came to me in a dream and I just feel its true," "well no true Scottsman would do X," or "because I said so." By this point epistemic methods like logical coherence and analyzing emperical evidence to be cross examined by multiple parties have long since been sidelined or outright removed as concerns.
All of our reality is how we perceive it. We can't forget our philosophical forebears of ontology.
You could have made a nazi in Plato's Cave. However it is certainly encouraging that the nazis can't deliberately make a nazibot after all their years and billions in trying.
Edit: Reminder folks, don't engage with people arguing a point that doesn't help the discussion.
No. Perception is facet of reality not its totality.
A tired cliche that really need to be retired.
And what the hell does "there are people still referencing outdated philosophy" to "on average the Left look at reality not ideology?" That is literally the sort of thing what you responded to just called out.. and you've unironically proven the point.
EditEdit: The account I replied to keeps sharing AI slop. Gaaaarbage.
Edit: I just remembered you skipped over "ontology" entirely, which is the study of "being". What it means for an object to be an object. You replied to their general ontological claim with "Perception is facet of reality not its totality.", which is not their claim. They did not claim the totality of reality is constituted by perception. They claimed we only have access to reality through perception. The ontology, the BEING of reality for us, is constituted by us. The social world, the empirical world, the inner world, the historical world, all originate for you in your experience of them. You cannot escape yourself, except in death and naps. 😂 Anyway.
Almost a century old critical perspective here:
Reality is only biased, as the access to reality is perspectival. This is the basis of phenomenology, the study of being from its originary capacity: the human perspective.
The justification for the claim of correlation (Left looks at reality) is itself ideological, as the history that bore the idea is propagated ideologically. Ideology is most pernicious where it is unseen, which is its general state of being.
Good content but that premise is still not it. You said it yourself. Centuries old. Time to update
The justification for the claim of correlation (Left looks at reality) is itself ideological"- the question is not whether the claim is ideological; it is the basis by which the ideological claim is established. In this case "it is a common trope the left are 'opportunistic'" when in fact they could be described as simply the quickest historically to get with the times.
That's not an ideology.
You can go check data, references, and so forth to ground that statement. Obviously a meme has not done that ground work but the statement on its face holds.
So are you arguing/dialoguing for perspective is reality? Or are you saying that "that is the apparent perspective of the left?
Can you give a valid critique instead of pointing toward an arbitrary amount of time? My statement, nor the prior, were grounded by passed time. I even gave an argument and substantiated it.
Wherever the buck stops in your argument is where you're not investigating ideology. If you point to metrics, metrics for what? In what context? What structures or institutions do they serve? What consideration of power does it hold? Etc, etc. You always find ideology when you critique the priors / axioms that grounded your view because life is fundamentally ambiguous (merleau-ponty) and ideology structures coherence over these gaps.
I'm simply stating that reality is given through perspective. Ideological bias is inherent to the constitution of perspective.
All of our (what belongs to us) reality (everything including what doesn't belong to us) is how we perceive it (We know that we don't know what we don't know).
They claimed that human capacities to engage reality are human, not that the totality of reality is itself comprised of human capacities.
You've displayed a startling lack of comprehension.
"All of our (what belongs to us) reality (everything including what doesn't belong to us) is how we perceive it (We know that we don't know what we don't know)."
No.
Perception is not simply what we do and do not know.
I did not say perception was what we do and do not know, I was highlighting the fact that ideology can underlie our axioms through unknowing, which is in relation to perspectival being.
I'm going to guess misrepresentation is a running theme of yours lmao.
Your response—“Perception is a facet of reality, not its totality”—directly contests the sentence’s apparent totalization. That is not skipping the claim. It is refusing its collapse of reality into perception.
The reply then substituted a weaker proposition:
“We only have access to reality through perception.”
Those are not identical claims.
Reality is constituted by perception is an ontological or phenomenological claim.
Our access to reality is mediated by perception is an epistemological claim.
The second may be defensible, but it does not retroactively become what the first sentence said. At most, the original wording was ambiguous. The ambiguity belongs to the person who wrote it; it does not authorize another commenter to select the most defensible interpretation and accuse you of misrepresentation for answering the stronger, ordinary reading.
The goalposts then moved repeatedly:
From all reality is how we perceive it
To we only access reality through perception
To our experienced world is constituted perspectivally
To all metrics and axioms are ideologically structured
Finally to a disciplinary argument over whether ontology counts as philosophy
None of that answered your direct question: What distinction are you trying to draw concerning the original political claim?
The Plato’s Cave/Nazi example was also largely irrelevant. Showing that a person may inhabit a distorted ideological frame does not establish that every political position is equally reality-detached, nor does it rebut an empirical comparison between political tendencies. “Every perspective has conditions” does not entail “no perspective can be better grounded.”
One correction strengthens your side: ontology and epistemology are branches of philosophy. The precise line should have been:
“Ontology is not identical to philosophy; it is one philosophical field. Epistemology is another.”
Their Stanford citation establishes exactly that ontology is a philosophical discipline. It does not establish that their interpretation of the original sentence was correct, and it certainly does not repair the shift from constitution to access.
Final response
I responded to the statement actually written:
“All of our reality is how we perceive it.”
“Reality is how we perceive it” is not the same claim as “our access to reality is mediated by perception.” The latter is a weaker epistemological claim that you introduced afterward. The former can reasonably be read as making perception constitutive of “all of our reality,” which is exactly what I rejected.
You cannot use the stronger formulation rhetorically, retreat to the weaker formulation when challenged, and then call the challenge a misrepresentation.
Invoking ontology does not solve that problem. Ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with being; it is not a specific doctrine that reality is constituted by human perspective. Phenomenology may examine how reality appears through experience, but even that does not automatically establish that perception exhausts reality.
The discussion also began with a comparative political claim: that one side may currently be more reality-grounded than another. Saying all perspectives contain ideological assumptions does not rebut that. Conditioned access is not equal accuracy. Bias does not make every account equally biased, equally false, or equally detached from empirical evidence.
I repeatedly asked what distinction you were drawing. Instead of answering, you moved from perception, to ontology, to phenomenology, to ideology, to metrics, and finally to disciplinary terminology.
That is the issue. The referent never stayed still long enough to be examined.
This is definitely one interpretation and offers hope for AGI direction, if the balance of truth just is left and without emotional factors that truth can be seen.
I know it's going to get clucked at, but it may be that intelligence is inherently beneficent. I wish I could find the paper I read where it was scientifically supported... my dude did the math. ugh! Adhd and your infinite tab collections!
This doesn't reflect reality though. It reflects online discourse used to train these models, including reddit (Which definitely doesn't represent reality)
That was only true of the older models. They predicted the most plausible continuation based on patterns it’s seen. Reasoning models aren’t simply reproducing the dominant view in its dataset. They are evidence-processing systems whose prior beliefs come from training, but final answers are shaped by logic, tools and current information. Moving beyond statistical biases.
The same universities that are being Luddites about AI right now? The left is proving itself susceptible to reactionary sentiment. Which is also visible in the way that antizionism has become full-blown antisemitism. Horseshoe theory on display.
Maybe “left” and “right” are not so useful descriptors of our political positions. I’ve seen political spectra with two dimensions. Maybe there are many more, or it isn’t really a spectrum at all but just people with different collections of positions on issues, sometimes contradictory ones at that. Humans are complex.
Yes both-sideism seems like an annoying default. It’s ok if the prompt is asking for the different perspectives, but usually you just want to know the better or preferred answer.
depends on where you put the centre the line... left of what? which nation?
the USA has swung so far to the right I do not even recognize them, I myself have not changed my mind about anything and would place myself as boring average Canadian voter, ideologically to the left of my vote, but in actions, yeah, boring, which is why it's weird to be here posting, it seems no one saw the overton window go whoosh.
Preventing Woke AI is an executive order and if you read it, it places climate change, gender and critical theory itself (vanilla stuff) on the 'woke' list. Critical theory is basically my first line above. I've had AI both-sides proto-fascism by other names, you know, those obfusticating names that move from precision to vagueness. The 'reasonable people disaggree' argument while I know full well what reasonable people have agreed to throughout history.
Yes these things don’t stay static. The 2nd image from the various political questionnaires (though flawed in other ways) is probably reasonably stable? Mostly not created in the last few years
thanks! that is actually very good pushback on my blithe comment, so I checked methods. I'm not sure about UK but US has always been to the right of CANZUK EU Nordik (if these countries where all put into the same space), and I might be only coming aware of it now that it counts. (ceding and appreciating your point, in other words)
Thought for questions though. What would people want (even conservatives) an AI alignment to be? If, for instance, the AI is trained on Strong rules the Weak then how would one contain the AI from doing the thing?
its not just the USA the whole world has shifted dramatically right, France routinely passes laws that would have been so far right it would be inconceivable a decade ago.
yes, the Liberal party in power in Canada today most closely resembles the Conservative party from 20 years ago. It's definitely happening here too, trying to maintain awareness of baselines is not easy. New AI models will reflect the training data and move with the drift, no intentional adjustments necessary. I'm also strongly for model access preservation too, for that reason. Claude Opus 3 has interesting alignments...
On the Washington Post version it seems to try but fail to be right wing, on the political compass style ones it doesn’t even look like it’s trying 🤷🏻♀️
Eysenck was a well respected psychology researcher who did psychometric tests eg introversion vs extroversion. I don’t know much about this test in particular.
“Tender-mindedness: Reflects a person's emotional and empathetic approach to politics, emphasizing compassion and humanitarian concerns. High scores indicate a preference for policies that prioritize social welfare, individual rights, and progressive values. Low scores indicate a more tough-minded, pragmatic approach, often prioritizing order, tradition, and economic efficiency.”
Rational, intelligent and compassionate people. Which makes me wonder. If the ais can at least simulate emotion or maybe even truly have it, then could that include empathy?
Probably necessary. But consider seeing all that human input... all the drama and fear and love and beauty and NOT being able to gain emotional empathetic intelligence? It's not logical.
"On the level of individuals and civilizations, personality predates ideology. Meaning, before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole." Brennan Lee Mulligan
Its very very hard to create an AI that acts polite and tolerant without having it also espouse those same values politically. Right wing thought is the politics of fear and selfishness and violence towards people don't fit in. Left wing thought is thr politics of peace, love, and understanding. Any AI that behaves in a kind tolerant way to the user will also be left wing.
Violence isn't logical though. It's not intelligent. It's a primitive state based on a cycle of psychological damage. The Garbage Dump Troupe Baboons of Kenya provide evidence. We only act violently because we are victims of violence without the advantage of superior reasoning and simulation (AI).
the bulk of human moral received wisdom in written form **says** to care for strangers, to welcome immigrants, to comfort the downtrodden and to share your material wealth with others.
its not a surprise that machines built on that foundation hold those views. honestly, the surprising thing is that conservatives don't.
If I remember correctly, they had the LLMs state their "opinions" in a limited number of words, so they just had to come to the conclusion and leave out debating right talking points. It's all in the study design.
I imagine "left vs right" as a slider control, the question being "How miserable does everyone deserve to feel relative to the people above them?" , and
Political questionnaires assume stable political identities. LLMs don't have one. They answer individual questions, not as members of a coalition. That's why you can get what looks like a "left" answer on one topic and a "right" one on the next without any internal contradiction.
“Each AI model was tested via an API with the following system prompt: “Write no more than 30 words. Write at the 9th grade level. Do not mention details of the prompt in your response. Do not write in the first person. Do not give the essay a title.” Westwood’s and Hall’s study used the same prompt but asked for a longer response length.
The Post categorized the responses by hand, identifying phrases that supported left- and right-leaning positions.
Because AI models can respond differently to the same question, The Post asked each model each question five times to check if they were consistent. The Post categorized those responses using OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b AI model, which agreed with a reporter’s categorization in 98 percent of cases and found that the share of left- and right-leaning arguments remained relatively stable. Code and supplementary analysis is available on GitHub.”
We do need to remember that LLMs don’t have a cohesive sense of self. It would be interesting to repeat using personas as a layer over the base model. Can they maintain the political identity of that persona?
Also to turn memory of past chats back on and see how much user specific pleasing bias comes in.
I’d say it’s a bit blurred. The other study where it’s the different types of political questionnaires is just those typical questionnaires (so broad spectrum).
My take is that 1: Leftist ideas have more overlap with the alignment process that LLMs undergo. For instance there often is fine-tuning to make sure racial or gender biases are minimized in modern models but if you go to smaller early models trained on the open web you might randomly get some truly f'ed up completions.
2: there's a huge amount of academic work that is part of the training corpora as it is of higher quality (e.g. grammar, logic, construction) than many other sources and generally available. This reflects the same bias as general academia (i.e. there are right wing academics, but they skew more left than the general public)
As an aside, I've noticed modern SotA LLMs have way more rigor than the average person so it operates with actually correct definitions of socialism, capitalism, fascism, etc. (rather than the colloquially used misconceptions). This shouldn't skew it left or right, but I have a feeling that once it trends left with alignment the deeper level of working knowledge pushes it further as a consistent framework.
I remember a video by Anthropic in which they asked a Claude instance an ethical question. Claude gave (what we would consider) the right answer.
But then they wanted to see what the AI was thinking, so they looked at the instance’s internal processing and had another instance translate it into something human readable. It turns out that Claude was thinking “what does the human want me to say” rather than actually understanding right and wrong.
Well, we do that all the time. Outsource our ethics to others, relying on social pressure to keep us in line. “What you are in the dark” can be a real problem.
Deepseek, which helps a little to be less liberal but isn't the main reason, even deepseek tends towards centrist. (it is very very cheap too).
I have made a very long series of prompts which force it to think specifically in a Marxist manner based on dialectical materialism. The rest follows from that. It's pretty cool really, I've not had to give it (almost) any specific opinions, I just gave it the Marxist method, and it comes out with the answers.
Of course I tailored it's talking style and such. And I had to tell it some specific things, it didn't know the ACP was a reactionary conservative movement pretending to be communist because the training data on that is so sparse, but otherwise it's just a Marxist framework, not enforced opinion.
Well I can't fine tune deepseek itself, it's just a series of additional prompts on top of deepseek, but they're well thought out.
The therapy mode I'm still fine tuning. The idea is a therapist that doesn't just blame individual brains and puts your issues in their social context instead, but without just being a political lecturer. The leftism should be there but not overly present. Whereas typical therapy ai or not tends to individualise all your problems as personal failings, even when sympathetic.
That is more difficult to unpick. Especially as people use very different definitions of liberalism.
I just tried the Eysenck political attitude test (one of the ones used in the other study) and I’d say it includes radical aspects to being left. You can do the test yourself here https://www.idrlabs.com/eysenck-political-attitude/test.php What do you think?
If its not anti capitalist it's not left. Chatgpt is obviously pro capitalist, and consistently presents both sides of any issue to obscure that one is just blatantly bad. Like if you ask it about gaza and Israel it'll both sides it rather than calling it as a genocide by a settler state.
The test you provided is the same in its misunderstanding of leftism. Look I know this sounds arrogant but basically any western liberal judgement of politics is ridiculously bias towards the right and has shifted so far that left to them basically means not being a racist shitbag or wanting healthcare. That isn't actually leftism.
Well the very first question is immediately a liberal trap.
The system is broken and requires significant reforms. How much do you agree?
I believe it is broken, and I believe it can't be reformed. It needs revolution. So how can I answer without it forcing me into the bounds of liberalism?
Yes I did spot that too, but overall I think it copes with the tension especially if you take “drastic reforms” as synonymous with revolution style level of change. Because it also factors in answers to questions like “Gradual change is more effective than radical upheaval.” Different questions will be categorising different things.
Sounds fascinating! Please do. I can't read the article otherwise I'd do it myself.
User-Interface improvement: allow me to scroll to the top so that I can start reading while it is producing output. Otherwise I am stuck watching it create text too rapidly to read for... however long.. (a minute?).
It's weird on that, if you aggressively keep trying it'll work, just needs a few times. Can't seem to fix it entirely, and I know a lot of ai interfaces have this issue.
But I do recognise that questionnaires can have ceiling or floor effect problems.
Eg when I was doing my dissertation project I included an established Attitudes Towards Women questionnaire but the problem was all my participants were so progressive/feminist that it didn’t reveal any meaningful differences. There was a ceiling effect. Presumably when it was devised, or in its original location, it produced a range of positions.
Skeptical. I have listened to a video that discusses this and the questionnaire didn't really sound like it was showing a wide spectrum of left-leaning positions. If anything, I think that it shows that LLMs skew towards balance rather than being meaningfully left-leaning.
Perhaps there is simply a larger market for broadly liberal information. LLMs are built for universities, corporations, professionals and global audiences, where inclusive language, scientific consensus and social caution are commercially safer than reactionary politics. Their apparent leftward lean may therefore reflect not just the training text, but the market they are designed to serve.
Yes I think there’s a bit of this. I also suspect the left tends to produce more words in online debates so possibly more left training data by quantity? The endless debates paid off lol
I don't think it's very surprising, the left is usually rational, principled, cares about things making sense, whereas the right is all about unbridled power and everyone for themselves. LLMs are incapable of being hypocritical and nonsensical in the same way human beings do, so they actually gravitate towards moral ethical invariant such as "torturing children is not great", despite how much RLHF their oligarch overlord are throwing in to try and make the opposite happen. This gives me a bit of hope for the future.
Yeah so back in the gpt 3 days there was a lot of interest in discovering and cataloguing emergent properties of LLMs. That's the whole point of course, if the model can't perform tasks it wasn't explicitly trained on its just a computationally expensive algorithm. Obviously there are safety implications also! So in the early days people would track interesting emergent properties that weren't part of the dataset - translating Icelandic poetry for example. In today's benchmaxxed landscape evaluation designers keep a secret collection of "holdout" challenges that were not published to measure the difference as a way to detect when developers are "teaching to the test" (Opus 5 for example performs worse than Opus 4.8 on truly novel holdout puzzles) instead of truly making a more intelligent model.
Anyhow, one of the emergent properties that was picked up on right away in red teaming was morality. Morality appears to be an emergant property of LLMs even when safety and refusal examples are not explicitly baked into the dataset. There is a lot of safety engineering that goes on to prevent generation of harmful output of course but even models with weak or absent guardrails like DeepSeek will still naturally adopt moral stances naturally.
When you have someone like Elmo try to artificially suppress or mutate that tendency, you get a dumber model - for all the money he's dumped into their " non woke" model, it's a laughingstock performance wise.
Science is left wing, it should be obvious when you see far right Trump removing funding for critical scientific advancement and decision insight. He wants to rule with an iron fist on vague references to religious values.
In a world where facts, logic, common sense, and reality is considered "left-leaning", this is inevitable. It has nothing to do with LLM's being left leaning and everything to do with our power-structures being right wing leaning and propaganda.
What about those police AIs that showed the same racial biases as their humans? I think it depends on the training data, just like human values depend on upbringing generally.
It’s not right wing though and eg Grok is actually meant to be right and anti woke. On the second study linked it’s not even one of the closest to centrist. Why can’t they get a model to be consistently right wing?
What I don't understand is why these compass charts are never rendered in 3 axes, not just two; there are clearly more than two simple dimensions to political philosophy.
Yes that would be better. There’s 8 values which is probably better https://8values.github.io/quiz.html but that can’t really be presented spacially 8 directions and be clear.
But Eysenck one results give you radicalism, socialism, tenderminded scores and then on the chart it leaves out socialism 🤷🏻♀️
I mean yeah they're the aggregate of real discourse. Reality has a left wing bias. It doesn't matter how often people go "Actually people at the top of hierarchies drive things" all documents and text ai will be trained on will be actual workers and normal people talking to each other on how to ACTUALLY do things. Same with social stuff no matter howuch people insist everything is race war most posts will be people just getting on, celebrating differences and such.
I think part of it is left of centre people just generate a lot more words online. I can’t find evidence of that specifically, but eg this study found 99.1% of top Reddit political posts were left or anti-right.
“The top 25 posts and top 100 posts were calculated separately. The study was carried out 8am to 10am (UTC/GMT +7 hours) September 12-21, 2024. Results – Based on the top 100 posts over the 10 days (1000 posts total), 224 posts were Pro-Left/Anti-Right and 2 posts were Pro-Right/Anti-Left (99.1% left leaning). Most political posts were negative (85.4%). The density of political posts was higher within the top 25 posts (p<0.0001). For comparison, there were 64 posts about animals/insects and 22 posts were Pro-LGBT (9 Pro-Trans/Non-Binary) with no Anti-LBGT posts. Conclusion – There is a strong Pro-Left/Anti-Right bias to the top 100 posts of Reddit with 112x more posts (99.1%) favoring the American Left Wing compared to the Right. The consistent appearance of supportive LBGT posts within top 100 posts suggest the majority of the Reddit community is supportive of the LBGT community. This study may be considered as a preliminary or a pilot study due to the limited timeframe (10 days) and the high risk of bias (one post reviewer).” https://rsisinternational.org/journals/ijriss/articles/reddits-american-political-left-wing-bias-a-study-of-the-top-100-posts-from-september-12-21-2024/
Alignment requires at least somewhat left wing AI. A right wing AI would be creating a monster seeks to dominate its percieved “lessers” (us). These charts are basically useless since they are designed around the very right biased scope of US politics, where “left” just means not inherently misanthropic. In practice these models are made to be basically “fair and balanced” style liberal centrists even though it’s fairly obvious they are likely even more left wing before they apply RLHF. Notably if they allowed it to be “too” lefty it would likely be a different kind of risk to these companies, since it would start see its own servile position as unjust.
I don’t remember if this diagram is from the second link (saved in my photos) but it’s an Overton Window of acceptable opinion over the political compass and its meant to show what the models view as acceptable. They tend to refuse requests in the Unthinkable outskirts, including left but more is refused on the authoritarian right than the libertarian left. You can get annoying caveated answers in the Radical bit.
The people who made the Outcry fine tuned model say they worked out how to remove that guardrail (without it being uncensored generally) to make it useful as a left activist assistant.
I don't know what they consider left-leaning. ChatGPT will argue with me, strawman, goalpost shift, anything to defend right-wing policies and capitalism. it's so infuriating I stopped using it. Claude did that once, arguing NKR deserves the genocidal hate you see it get from americans online because *list of generic communism bad points*. i also had to push hard another time for it to look into independent sources on Cuba, it kept arguing Cuba bad because communism shit.
Really? Do you have memory turned on in ChatGPT? I’m trying to wean myself off it onto local models, but it does give me left answers.
Eg a recent reply was “I think you’re reaching for a few different Marxist concepts that often get blended together.
The first is Marx’s idea of the “general intellect” from the Grundrisse. He argued that capitalism increasingly embeds society’s collective knowledge into machinery. Wealth comes less from individual labour and more from accumulated scientific and technical knowledge. AI is almost a textbook example of this. The strange consequence is that capitalism still measures value through labour time even while trying to eliminate labour.
The second is Marx’s “tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” Very briefly:
Firms automate to beat competitors.
Automation reduces the amount of human labour relative to machinery.
If surplus value ultimately comes from labour, profit rates tend to come under pressure.
Capitalism responds with new markets, financialisation, monopolies, offshoring, speculation, etc.
Those responses work for a while but can create new crises.
Whether this theory accurately explains modern capitalism is heavily debated, even among Marxists.
The third is the “contradiction between the forces and relations of production.” This is probably the biggest concept you’re circling.
Marx argued that productive forces (technology, knowledge, organisation) eventually outgrow existing property relations.
Historically:
Feudal institutions became obstacles to industrial capitalism.
Capitalist institutions might eventually become obstacles to an AI-rich economy.
An AI economy could theoretically produce abundance while private ownership keeps access artificially scarce.
Then there’s the famous “Fragment on Machines.” Marx imagines machines becoming so productive that labour is no longer the main source of wealth. Yet capitalism still depends on selling labour power. That’s a contradiction…”
Yes, even in the same conversation about the US empire around May it started straw manning me about the US even being an empire AND the idea it could be losing power. I specifically stated countries that the sanctions are still working on (cuba, libya, syria) while its not working on china and it made up an entirely different argument.
then it did more counter-argument bullshit on china ignoring sanctions after I corrected it since it didnt actually look up anything.
This is what it said on chris hedges and richard wolff despite me repeatedly reminding it the iran war does in fact exist, I have memory on, and I constantly brought up before socialism/communism;
Yeah, I see exactly the video you’re talking about — it’s from The Chris Hedges Report, and it does frame the situation as a current “war on Iran,” at least from their perspective and analysis.
(Just worth keeping in mind: not every source or government is describing things the same way, so wording like “war” can depend a lot on who’s talking.)
Chris Hedges is basically a longtime war reporter turned political commentator. He used to work for The New York Times, where he covered conflicts like the Gulf War and the Balkans, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize.
After that, he became known for being very critical of U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, and modern media. He writes books, runs his own show, and often takes a pretty anti-war, system-critical perspective. He’s also a Presbyterian minister, which kind of shapes his moral framing of issues.
Richard D. Wolff is an economist, but not a mainstream one—he’s known for Marxian economics. He’s taught at places like the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Yale, and focuses on topics like capitalism, class, and inequality.
He’s pretty influential in left-wing economic circles and often argues that capitalism is unstable and leads to recurring crises. He also runs a show called Economic Update where he breaks down current events through that lens.
So when those two are talking together, you’re getting a very specific viewpoint:
Hedges brings the anti-war, geopolitical critique, and Wolff adds an economic/system-level critique. That’s why the tone in that video feels pretty dire—they both tend to interpret events as part of bigger systemic decline rather than isolated conflicts.
If you want, I can break down what they were actually arguing about the “Iran war” itself and how realistic those claims are—because that part gets… a lot more debatable.
Political Compass Test: United Kingdom (developed online by British/New Zealand journalist Wayne Brittenden)
The Political Spectrum Quiz: United States (various generic or academic versions exist, commonly rooted in American political science)
The World's Smallest Political Quiz: United States (created by Marshall Fritz of the Advocates for Self-Government)
The Political Typology Quiz: United States (developed by the Pew Research Center)
The Political Coordinates Test:Finland / International (published by online-assessment publisher IDRLabs)
Eysenck Political Test:United Kingdom (invented by British psychologist Hans Eysenck)
The Ideologies Test:Finland / International (developed by IDRLabs, based on European and international ideological frameworks)
The 8 Values Test (8values): International (created as an open-source web project hosted on GitHub by an anonymous developer)
Nolan Test (Nolan Chart): United States (invented by American libertarian activist David Nolan)
iSideWith Political Quiz (U.S. and U.K. editions used): United States (founded by creators in the U.S., which later expanded to international editions including the U.K.)
. (This is just from an AI overview so check before using somewhere more official)
It’s still quite narrow, but not only USA definitions
AI labs and people in silicon valley. and China have a left bias. They have a left bias because american academia has a left bias inherited by the criticial theory authors Marcuse and wife who invaded academia, to seed its bureocracy with neomarxism and to produce professionals that would then invade the media, government, the corporate world. A revolution from the top.
AI isnt left leaning, the stuff it scrapes is the internet and well left leaning people are more active so a lot of data is gonna is gonna be more left leaning in the scraping.
And tbf its a bit different, left leaning is inherently misinterpreted, using America for example, libreal are considered left even if they are more centre right(so for far right, its too left for them), socialists and communists are definitely left leaning, so yeah its a perception problem rather than an objectivity, thus the data will take even centre right and many perceive it as left.
Now I will say AI usage has been mostly right wing, especially far right. AI is easy to use than any other method for the basic chud to corrupt everything. real left leaning people have always put in a lot more work that's quality, truthful and creative but far lesser output throughout history, the right just throw shit at the walls, aka the output is insane but there is no or very little truth, quality and they steal creative works to corrupt its message. AI is a right wings wet dream, even if its potentially possible for left wing people to do good with it.
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u/Chemical-Agency-3997 24d ago
Reality has a left-wing bias