Eddie Yang

Study finds state media in training data causes LLMs to reflect government propaganda in native languages

Researchers from University of Oregon, Purdue, UCSD, NYU, and Princeton found that state-controlled media is heavily overrepresented in web-scraped training datasets, causing Claude 3 Sonnet and GPT-4o to express significantly more favorable attitudes toward authoritarian governments when prompted in those governments' native languages. Chinese state media accounts for over 40x more documents in CulturaX than Chinese Wikipedia, and both models reproduced state-media strings at 3-5% rates. When prompted in Chinese, both models favored China's government roughly 68-75% of the time versus English prompts on the same topics, with the effect scaling with a country's World Press Freedom Index ranking.