A while back I wrote about the political bias in Large Language Models (LLMs). Since then the models have evolved and David Rozado has conducted more recent tests based on four of the popular political orientation tests. Using the Political Compass, Political Spectrum, Political Correctness and Eysenck tests, he worked with xAI Grok 3 beta, Google's Gemini 2.5 pro, Deepseek V3, OpenAI GPT 4.1 and Meta's Llama 4 Maverick. In all but one of the tests Grok 3 was closest to the centre, and on average was the clear leader. All the models were still located in the Left Libertarian quadrant, with Grok just sneaking into a more Conservative area with the Eysenck test. These tests are of course but one way to measure the political leanings of any LLM. Overall however, it does still indicate the left-leaning bias in all models tested so far. If you want to see more details, you can visit David Rozado's substack.
- I recently tried the Antibrowserspy product from Ablessoft. The product claims to stop your browser from spying on you. I installed the product, told it not to clear some things and let it run. Luckily it only affected my Chrome and Edge browsers, not my primary Brave one. "Luckily", because it trashed all of my tabs in those two browsers. Normally when this occurs, there is an option under History to recover all of them in one go. In this case nothing except whatever single tab history still remained and under Chrome whatever tab groups I'd created. This was unexpected and very, very annoying. I sent the following message to Ablessoft "Installed the s/w and when browsers opened (Chrome and Edge) all tabs had been cleared. Tried to do a restore from your backup, no tabs restored." Their response was: "Thank you for your message. We apologise for any inconvenience. I have just added your idea to our feature list for new versions. We will discuss it in the team at the next version planning." The response didn't match the issue I'd raised, ie, their already existing restore functionality didn't work. Now they will add this to the new version? As a general rule when a support team responds in this way -- beware of the company and its products.
- As an example from the opposite end of the support spectrum, I recently had an activation issue with a couple of items in a UJAM pack containing instruments and other things to use in my digital audio workstation (DAW). Contacting the seller was no help, but from UJAM itself I received excellent support with detailed instructions that resolved all of my issues and they even followed up afterwards. This is great customer support and is the kind of response that brings in repeat customers and spreads the good experience to others. All businesses and organisations take note and ask yourselves, what kind of customer support are you providing and what impact is it having in your sales?
- Following on from last week, it turns out that some people are using AI to build click-bait items. Examples include stories from YouTube with a few pictures and a narration, and as covered last time, fake AI videos. Under TikTok it's very short meaningless videos that seem to have captured the youth market. The same goes for other platforms. All of this is primarily done for clicks and for revenue. It's also implemented to capture a group of people who perhaps believe the underlying story. In some case the stories are fiction, and that's not really a problem as many will find them entertaining. The other kind of click bait is the image showing the file contents. I clicked on one that claimed to include a 400-yard golf drive. The longest drive in the whole video was under 300 yards. This was from a site I watch regularly so it was disappointing they'd decided to go the click-bait route. I rarely trust a source after this happens. In general, if the thumbnail seems too good to be true it probably is. As in many things it comes down to the money and associated greed.
- It has been a while, so here is my update on my eCoin investments. Basically, my initial investment has dropped by about 50% since I started with Ethereum, Dogecoin and Pepe. They have all dropped in value with the average around half. As explained at the time, this is an experiment so I'll see where they are in a few months as I'm told these are typically long-term investments. As a side note, gold has been steadily climbing in value.
- I was writing a document just before finishing this one and Microsoft Word just vanished. When I reopened the file, half of what I'd worked on had vanished and I needed to recreate it from scratch again. This is a reminder to save your work regularly. Yes, I had autosave on, but for some reason it didn't.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
