Bias in artificial intelligence systems, or the fact that large language models, facial recognition, and AI image generators can only remix and regurgitate the information in data those technologies are trained on, is a well established fact that researchers and academics have been warning about since their inception. In a blog post about the release of Llama 4, Meta’s open weights AI model, the company clearly states that bias is a problem it’s trying to address, but unlike mountains of research which established AI systems are more likely to discriminate against minorities based on race, gender, and nationality, Meta is specifically concerned with Llama 4 having a left-leaning political bias. “It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics,” Meta said in its blog. “This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.” “Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models and to make sure that Llama can understand and articulate both sides of a contentious issue,” Meta continues. “As part of this work, we’re continuing to make Llama more responsive so that it answers questions, can respond to a variety of different viewpoints without passing judgment, and doesn’t favor some views over others.” Meta then lists a few “improvements” in Llama 4, including that the model will now less often refuse to engage users who ask about political and social topics overall, that it “is dramatically more balanced with which prompts it refuses to respond to,” and favorably compares its lack of a “strong political lean” to Grok, xAI’s LLM which Elon Musk continually promotes as a non-woke, “based” alternative to comparable products from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
via 404media: Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”