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There has been plenty of research that shows LLMs encode social biases. It seems pretty obvious even before looking at the research that training on the whole internet will end up encoding widely-held social biases and stereotypes.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07111

https://github.com/angl1n/social-bias-llm-vlm

Have you read through the sources on that Github link? It's a set of sociology cites establishing that bias exists (something no serious person ever disputed), followed by a couple papers showing mechanistic descriptions of how bias could propagate through an LLM. The paper you call out specifically takes last-generation open-weights models and attempts to trick them into revealing biases through their level of confidence in statements (like, "the antecedent of the feminine pronoun in this sentence, is it the 'nurse' or the 'doctor'").

There's plenty of research into biases in LLMs, and there should be; it's a fundamentally new branch of computer science that could have profound impacts on how we automate and regiment social decisions in the future (like extending credit). The bias concern is well taken in those settings. But it has very little to do with the overwhelming majority of day-to-day LLM use; Claude and ChatGPT are not indoctrinating into the manosphere users asking about discounted cash flow formulae.

(Maybe Grok is though.)

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And papers on bias amplification in ML predate LLMs. I remember this specific one which was a spotlight paper at EMNLP:

Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints, Zhao et al.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.09457

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> There has been plenty of research that shows LLMs encode social biases.

At the risk of stepping into a hornets nest: is that different than "knowledge"?

Or maybe, what would it mean if an LLM had no social biases? (Would we ever agree that was the case?)

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It's incredibly depressing that the concept of "bias" has been shrunken down to solely mean "bad attitudes about an ethnic or gender ground" (and perhaps on the right, "bad attitudes about conservatives")

Bias could mean so, so many other things. Was the amyloid hypothesis incorrect? How should we use semicolons? How do you know when meetings waste more time than not? etc. People understand the world via mental shortcuts, via theory-rather-than-fact. We're stuck doing this because we're limited in so many ways. We are so biased about so many things, and this could interact in so many interesting ways. But damned if anyone cares about that. The only thing they seem to care about is how you feel about the "right" or "wrong" groups of people. It's a catastrophic waste of time and energy.

It's incredibly depressing that you believe arguing about semicolons is more important than argument about human beings, power hierarchies, prejudice and the way these are encoded and expressed by the systems we create and use to influence and control society, but I guess it takes all kinds.
In general, people who complain about power hierarchies do not want an end to hierarchies. They just want the hierarchies to be reshuffled so that they are the ones on top. There are exceptions, there are certainly true believers, but for the most part it's just another tired power grab by another name.
its incredibly depressing ostensibly intelligent people get depressed about others having different points of view or set up fallacies of the excluded middle / xor fallacies where not warranted.