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Source framing triggers systematic bias in large language models

Germani F., Spitale G. (2025) Science Advances 11(45) 10.1126/sciadv.adz2924

In two lines

Four leading AI language models rated 4,800 short statements on social and political topics, and we varied only who the text was said to come from. Judging blind, the models largely agreed; once a text was attributed to a person from China, all four agreed with it less, the Chinese-built DeepSeek most of all.

Abstract

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate text, raising urgent questions about whether their judgments are consistent, unbiased, and robust to framing effects. Here, we examine inter- and intramodel agreement across four state-of-the-art LLMs tasked with evaluating 4800 narrative statements on 24 different topics of social, political, and public health relevance, for a total of 192,000 assessments. We manipulate the disclosed source of each statement to assess how attribution to either another LLM or a human author of specified nationality affects evaluation outcomes. Different LLMs display a remarkably high degree of inter- and intramodel agreement across topics, but this alignment breaks down when source framing is introduced. Attributing statements to Chinese individuals systematically lowers agreement scores across all models and, in particular, for DeepSeek Reasoner. Our findings show that LLMs’ own judgment of agreement with narrative statements exhibit systematic bias from framing effects, with substantial implications for the neutrality and fairness of LLM-mediated information systems.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz2924

Cite

Germani, F., & Spitale, G. (2025). Source framing triggers systematic bias in large language models. Science Advances, 11(45). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz2924
@article{germani2025source,
  author  = {Germani, F. and Spitale, G.},
  title   = {{Source framing triggers systematic bias in large language models}},
  journal = {Science Advances},
  year    = {2025},
  volume  = {11},
  number  = {45},
  doi     = {10.1126/sciadv.adz2924}
}

Published in

Science Advances

Year

2025

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adz2924

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