The increased adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential to shape public opinion have sparked interest in assessing these models' political leanings. Building on previous research that compared LLMs and human opinions and observed political bias in system responses, we take a step further to investigate the underlying causes of such biases by empirically examining how the values and biases embedded in training corpora shape model outputs. Specifically, we propose a method to quantitatively evaluate political leanings embedded in the large pretraining corpora. Subsequently we investigate to whom are the LLMs' political leanings more aligned with, their pretrainig corpora or the surveyed human opinions. As a case study, we focus on probing the political leanings of LLMs in 32 U.S. Supreme Court cases, addressing contentious topics such as abortion and voting rights. Our findings reveal that LLMs strongly reflect the political leanings in their training data, and no strong correlation is observed with their alignment to human opinions as expressed in surveys. These results underscore the importance of responsible curation of training data and the need for robust evaluation metrics to ensure LLMs' alignment with human-centered values.

Its absence left open a void in Google Play and Apple's App Store, which have been quietly filling with scam apps that sucker users into paying for weekly or monthly subscriptions, according to research from security firm Sophos. The official ChatGPT app, meanwhile, is free, and an Android version is arriving soon. But just because something is free doesn't make it good. Telly TV is offering 55-inch televisions for $0 to the first 500,000 people who join its reservation list. Of course, "free" comes with a catch: The company reserves the right to collect heaps of data about your viewing habits, and the TV includes a built-in camera that can track your movements.

When we think about the future of our world and what exactly that looks like, it's easy to focus on the shiny objects and technology that make our lives easier: flying cars, 3D printers, digital currencies and automated everything. In the opening scene of the animated film WALL-E – which takes place in the year 2805 – a song from "Hello, Dolly!" happily plays in the background, starkly contrasting the glimpse we get of our future planet Earth: an abandoned wasteland with heaping piles of trash around every corner. Humans had all evacuated Earth by this point and were living in a spaceship, where futuristic technology and automation left them overweight, lazy and completely oblivious to their surroundings. Machines do everything for them, from the hoverchairs that carry them around, to the robots that prepare their food. Glued to their screens all day, which have taken control of their lives and decisions, humans exhibit lazy behaviors like video chatting the person physically next to them.

Parents in Fairfax, Va., protest two controversial books being displayed in the holiday reading section of school libraries. Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is seeking a social media monitoring service that will track hate speech as well as purported harassment and threats against employees, students, or racial groups – resurfacing concerns about First Amendment rights and school safety. A request for proposal (RFP), which closed last week, showed the Virginia school district offering $200,000 to "detect help deter any negative actions or consequences coming from social media which may be directed to racial groups or any student or teacher within FCPS." Under technical and functional requirements, the school district lists "Automatically classify aliases, usernames, emails websites, etc."; "Visually identify relationships and connections between persons"; "Save search queries and set alerts for active listening"; and "False positive reduction with embedded violence language classifier and metadata optimization technology." LINCOLNIA, VIRGINIA - AUGUST 23: Masked students arrive to the first day of class at Glasgow Middle School in Lincolnia, Virginia, on Monday, August 23, 2021, the first day back to school for the Fairfax County school district.

When we think about the future of our world and what exactly that looks like, it's easy to focus on the shiny objects and technology that make our lives easier: flying cars, 3D printers, digital currencies and automated everything. In the opening scene of the animated film WALL-E – which takes place in the year 2805 – a song from "Hello, Dolly!" happily plays in the background, starkly contrasting the glimpse we get of our future planet Earth: an abandoned wasteland with heaping piles of trash around every corner. Humans had all evacuated Earth by this point and were living in a spaceship, where futuristic technology and automation left them overweight, lazy and completely oblivious to their surroundings. Machines do everything for them, from the hoverchairs that carry them around, to the robots that prepare their food. Glued to their screens all day, which have taken control of their lives and decisions, humans exhibit lazy behaviors like video chatting the person physically next to them.

On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver turned his attention to the increasingly widespread use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement. Heavily citing Kashmir Hill's investigation of Clearview AI in the New York Times, Oliver explained how a then little-known company created a groundbreaking app where users can take a picture of a person, upload it, and cross-reference it against 3 billion images that the company has scraped from Facebook, Twitter, Venmo, and other websites. Since Hill's investigation was published, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others have sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview for violating the websites' terms of service. Still, the company maintains that harvesting the personal information of millions for a secretive database is within the company's First Amendment rights. "You might as well argue that you have an Eighth Amendment right to dress up rabbits like John Lennon," Oliver said.

Hoan Ton-That, CEO of creepy facial recognition company Clearview AI, made the bold claim on Tuesday that his company has the right to publicly posted photos on Twitter and wielded the First Amendment as his reason. Clearview AI faced heat after it was discovered they had mined billions of publicly accessible images from Facebook and Ton-That's comments prove the company isn't backing down. EXCLUSIVE: The founder of a facial recognition company described as both "groundbreaking" and "a nightmare" is speaking out. In an interview with CBS This Morning, Ton-That was asked about Twitter's cease-and-desist order requesting that his company stop scraping it's data and delete everything Clearview AI has collected from the platform. In response, the facial recognition CEO claimed his company has a first amendment right to the data.

Uber has fired the head of its self-driving car unit, Anthony Levandowski, amid the continuing fallout from the engineer's alleged theft of trade secrets from his former employer, Google. The termination, which was first reported by the New York Times, comes three months after Levandowksi was accused of stealing 14,000 internal documents from Google's self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, and taking them to Uber. Waymo sued Uber in February, alleging that the ride-hail company was using the stolen documents to advance its lidar technology, and the case between the two Silicon Valley firms is set to go to trial in October. Uber has denied any wrongdoing, but Levandowski has invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. He has refused to turn over any documents or answer questions during a deposition.

An Amazon Echo device is displayed at the Ford booth at CES 2017 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 5, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon is sticking to its guns in the fight to protect customer data. The tech titan has filed a motion to quash the search warrant for recordings from an Amazon Echo in the trial of James Andrew Bates, accused of murdering friend Victor Collins in Bentonville, Arkansas in November 2015. And it's arguing that the responses of Alexa, the voice of the Echo, has First Amendment rights as part of that motion. The case first came to light in December, when it emerged Amazon was contesting an order to provide audio from the Echo device, during the 48-hour period from November 21 through 22 2015, alongside subscriber and account information.