Are LLMs setting up our political ideologies?

As users trade search engines for generative AI, the battle for ideological influence moves to the prompt box.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the word ‘chatbot’ conjured images of clumsy customer service windows on commercial websites, machines that stumbled the moment a question strayed from the script. Those bots were trained on narrow, hand-fed datasets built for a single purpose and incapable of venturing beyond it. Then, in November 2022, OpenAI released a product named ChatGPT, and the rules of the game changed overnight. It was a rupture in how societies would come to access information. Investment poured in, competitors multiplied, and within two years, Large Language Models (LLMs) began to displace the search engine as the first stop for curiosity.