Does AI Have Political Opinions?

This article was originally published on the author's blog and re-published to TOPBOTS with permission from the author. There's a quote about how in polite society, you should never talk about three things: politics, religion, and money. In this article, I break polite conventions to determine how an AI would respond to all three of those topics. As AI tools become more and more integrated into our lives (such as writing news articles or being used in mental health chatbots), it's important (and curious) to know if these tools generate outputs that reflect certain political opinions. In this article, I probe OpenAI's GPT-3 model on contentious political, economic, and social topics by having it take the Political Compass, a popular test for measuring one's political leaning.