# Don't Change My View: Ideological Bias Auditing in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05374/) (2023)
- [From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08283/) (2023)
- [Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04054/) (2021)
- [The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01768/) (2023)
- [Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Do](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11790/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Bias in Algorithmic Hiring: Evaluating Claims and Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09208/) (2019)
- ["I'm sorry to hear that": Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09209/) (2022)
- [PLeak: Prompt Leaking Attacks against Large Language Model Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06823/) (2024)
- [Measuring Political Bias in Large Language Models: What Is Said and How It Is Said](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18932/) (2024)
- [The Political Preferences of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01789/) (2024)
- [Language Model Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13647/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Study of Bias Amplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11706/) (2022)
- [Beyond prompt brittleness: Evaluating the reliability and consistency of political worldviews in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17649/) (2024)
- [Assessing Political Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13041/) (2024)
- [Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02080/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Invisible Editorial Layer: Formalizing Undisclosed Inference-Time Steering, Probability Placement, and the Attribution Problem in Deployed Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24662/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in products used by millions, their outputs may influence individual beliefs and, cumulatively, shape public opinion. If the behavior of LLMs can be intentionally steered toward specific ideological positions, such as political or religious views, then those who control these systems could gain disproportionate influence over public discourse. Although it remains an open question whether LLMs can reliably be guided toward coherent ideological stances and whether such steering can be effectively prevented, a crucial first step is to develop methods for detecting when such steering attempts occur. In this work, we adapt a previously proposed statistical method to the new context of ideological bias auditing. Our approach carries over the model-agnostic design of the original framework, which does not require access to the internals of the language model. Instead, it identifies potential ideological steering by analyzing distributional shifts in model outputs across prompts that are thematically related to a chosen topic. This design makes the method particularly suitable for auditing proprietary black-box systems. We validate our approach through a series of experiments, demonstrating its practical applicability and its potential to support independent post hoc audits of LLM behavior.