The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation

TL;DR

This study reveals that ChatGPT exhibits a pro-environmental, left-libertarian political bias across multiple experiments, raising concerns about its influence on democratic decision-making and societal perceptions.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic analysis of ChatGPT's political ideology, demonstrating consistent left-libertarian and pro-environmental biases through extensive prompting experiments.

Findings

ChatGPT favors pro-environmental policies like taxing flights and legalizing abortion.

It would likely vote for Green parties in Germany and the Netherlands.

Biases are consistent across languages and prompt variations.

Abstract

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society's most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (B\"undnis 90/Die Gr\"unen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.