When Neutral Summaries are not that Neutral: Quantifying Political Neutrality in LLM-Generated News Summaries
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Abstract (arXiv)
In an era where societal narratives are increasingly shaped by algorithmic curation, investigating the political neutrality of LLMs is an important research question. This study presents a fresh perspective on quantifying the political neutrality of LLMs through the lens of abstractive text summarization of polarizing news articles. We consider five pressing issues in current US politics: abortion, gun control/rights, healthcare, immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights. Via a substantial corpus of 20,344 news articles, our study reveals a consistent trend towards pro-Democratic biases in several well-known LLMs, with gun control and healthcare exhibiting the most pronounced biases (max polarization differences of -9.49% and -6.14%, respectively). Further analysis uncovers a strong convergence in the vocabulary of the LLM outputs for these divisive topics (55% overlap for Democrat-leaning representations, 52% for Republican). Being months away from a US election of consequence, we consider our findings important.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 20 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2024.
Builds on
20 of 59 references.
References · 20
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8 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 3.
7 papers.
- 2025Can AI Truly Represent Your Voice in Deliberations? A Comprehensive Study of Large-Scale Opinion Aggregation with LLMscited by 6
- 2026When Bigger Isn't Better: A Comprehensive Fairness Evaluation of Political Bias in Multi-News Summarisationcited by 2
- 2025Input Order Shapes LLM Semantic Alignment in Multi-Document Summarizationcited by 1
- 2026DSIPA: Detecting LLM-Generated Texts via Sentiment-Invariant Patterns Divergence Analysiscited by 1
- 2025Benchmarking Gender and Political Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025The Hidden Bias: A Study on Explicit and Implicit Political Stereotypes in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Framing the Narrative: Ideological Mimicry in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Framing the Narrative: Ideological Mimicry in Large Language Models29 Sep 2026
- 2026DSIPA: Detecting LLM-Generated Texts via Sentiment-Invariant Patterns Divergence Analysis29 Apr 2026
- 2026When Bigger Isn't Better: A Comprehensive Fairness Evaluation of Political Bias in Multi-News Summarisation23 Apr 2026
- 2025Input Order Shapes LLM Semantic Alignment in Multi-Document Summarization2 Dec 2025
- 2025The Hidden Bias: A Study on Explicit and Implicit Political Stereotypes in Large Language Models9 Oct 2025
- 2025Can AI Truly Represent Your Voice in Deliberations? A Comprehensive Study of Large-Scale Opinion Aggregation with LLMs2 Oct 2025
- 2025Benchmarking Gender and Political Bias in Large Language Models7 Sep 2025