Artificial Authority: From Machine Minds to Political Alignments. An Experimental Analysis of Democratic and Autocratic Biases in Large-Language Models

Abstract: Political beliefs vary significantly across different countries, reflecting distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. These ideologies, ranging from liberal democracies to rigid autocracies, influence human societies, as well as the digital systems that are constructed within those societies. The advent of generative artificial intelligence, particularly LLMs, introduces new agents in the political space-agents trained on massive corpora that replicate and proliferate socio-political assumptions. This paper analyses whether LLMs display propensities consistent with democratic or autocratic world-views. We validate this insight through experimental tests in which we experiment with the leading LLMs developed across disparate political contexts, using several existing psychometric and political orientation measures. The analysis is based on both numerical scoring and qualitative analysis of the models' responses. Findings indicate high model-to-model variability and a strong association with the political culture of the country in which the model was developed. These findings highlight the need for more detailed examination of the socio-political dimensions embedded within AI systems.