Assessing political bias and value misalignment in generative artificial intelligence

Our analysis reveals a concerning misalignment of values between ChatGPT and the average American. We also show that ChatGPT displays political leanings when generating text and images, but the degree and direction of skew depend on the theme. Notably, ChatGPT repeatedly refused to generate content representing certain mainstream perspectives, citing concerns over misinformation and bias. As generative AI systems like ChatGPT become ubiquitous, such misalignment with societal norms poses risks of distorting public discourse. Without proper safeguards, these systems threaten to exacerbate societal divides and depart from principles that underpin free societies. • GPT-4’s responses align more with left-wing than average American political values. • AI text generation exhibits varying bias strength/direction across different themes. • Right-wing image generation refusals suggest potential First Amendment issues. • Meta-prompting induced GPT-4 to generate refused images without offensive content. • Calls for transparency, accountability from developers to mitigate societal risks.