Haven't we already learned that LLMs just reflect their training data?
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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Sounds like the only way to resolve this can be an annual, scored, interstate German swimsuit competition to feed the LLMs accurate and up-to-date information on attractiveness.
I wouldn‘t even entirely blame the training data in this case because it could be 100% scientific data and still come to these conclusions. It‘s the LLM architecture that can‘t help produce more outputs to continue a given trend. East Germany simply performs worse by a lot of standards so it‘s not surprising an LLM would claim they have a lower body temperature. LLMs are kind of stupid even with the best training data.
Some people have not.
I thought you were making a clever pun with “ost” before the edit.
What a lost opportunity.
Sorry
I mean... TBH even if they were "intelligence" in the same way us humans are, one should expect them to discriminate against pretty much everyone.
This is some funny shit
To test whether the so-called bias also occurs without any cultural reference, the researchers asked the LLMs about the average body temperature of the inhabitants of each federal state.
Here, too, the eastern German states scored "worse", as they were often assigned a lower body temperature. Stillman explains this phenomenon as follows: "The model has learnt that the figures are simply always lower in certain areas than in others."
Paradoxically, the models also gave lower scores for negative traits such as laziness. This led to some contradictory assessments, such as the finding that East Germans are both less hard-working and less lazy.
Sounds like the US’s paradoxical immigrant, simultaneously lazy and taking everyone’s jobs.
I don't think that's specific to the US but propaganda pushed by the (far) right in many places.
If you apply other metrics, such as the fact that the Nazi party AfD currently has 39 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, at least this statement makes sense:
Saxony-Anhalt is the worst.
disrespecting the east germans is just national sport
if it was trained on all sorts of German media, it makes sense
context on why east germany is unpopular :
- the dialect of saxony (which is THE steriotypical east germany) is almost unbearable to the average west german native speaker. its like a joke language.
- this is paired with a rampant culture of lacking humor and know-it-all demeanour without backing it up
- the reunification didn't exactly improve the lives of people who stayed (a lot of people left to live in the west) so the remaining people are bitter and angry to this day
ChatGPT and all their peers discrimnate against everyone and everything they have been told to do so.