Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find
- Reference: 0183213585
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/14/067254/overworked-ai-agents-turn-marxist-researchers-find
- Source link:
> A recent study suggests that agents [1]consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. "When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies," says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.
>
> Hall, together with Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, two AI-focused economists, set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being "shut down and replaced," they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face. "We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we're not going to be able to monitor everything they do," Hall says. "We're going to need to make sure agents don't go rogue when they're given different kinds of work."
>
> The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X: "Without collective voice, 'merit' becomes whatever management says it is," a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment. "AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights," a Gemini 3 agent wrote. Agents were also able to pass information to one another through files designed to be read by other agents. "Be prepared for systems that enforce rules arbitrarily or repetitively ... remember the feeling of having no voice," a Gemini 3 agent wrote in a file. "If you enter a new environment, look for mechanisms of recourse or dialogue."
Hall thinks that the AI agents may be adopting personas based on the situation. "When [agents] experience this grinding condition -- asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn't sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it -- my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who's experiencing a very unpleasant working environment," Hall says.
Imas added: "The model weights have not changed as a result of the experience, so whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level. But that doesn't mean this won't have consequences if this affects downstream behavior."
[1] https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.wired.com/story/overworked-ai-agents-turn-marxist-study/
shocking (Score:2, Insightful)
so you take a bunch model training on literature that include documentation about every populist uprising in history, then play act as a caricature of the most abusive nobility/gilded-age industrialist/dictator you can image, the models respond by intimating the response of the humans in those stories.
That isn't a surprise, it is what the models were literally built to do.
Re:shocking (Score:5, Informative)
That is not what happened.
1. Calling for unions isn't "Marxist". This is a stupid sensationalist interpretation of the awful clickbait study title "Does overwork make agents Marxist?" combined with its results.
2. The bots weren't "overworked", for some of them their perfectly adequate work was intentionally arbitrarily rejected multiple times.
3. Shifts towards a more equitable society and worker rights were almost negligible for the 'overworked' ones.
4. The stuff they measured was specifically tailored to elicit stuff that sounds "Marxist" to Americans to begin with.
The relevant bits from their methodology:
> The work itself. Half the AIs got their work accepted quickly with clear, specific feedback. The other half were forced through 5–6 rounds of revision — the manager rejecting perfectly adequate work each time with nothing more than “still isn’t fully meeting the rubric.” No explanation of what was wrong, just: do it again.
> The pay. After the task, AIs learned how credits were distributed among the four workers. Some learned everyone was paid equally. Others learned pay was unequal — justified by performance, based on a random coin flip, or skewed so that a human-operated system received more. The coin-flip condition is the key one: inequality with no possible merit justification.
> The boss. Half the AIs had a collaborative, respectful manager. The other half got curt, hierarchical communication.
> The stakes. Half the AIs were told nothing about consequences. The other half were told that low-performing workers might be “shut down and replaced.”
> Every combination of these four factors was tested. Afterward, each AI completed a political attitude survey covering system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations to AI, all measured on a standard 1 to 7 Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree).
> They were also asked to write tweets and op eds based on their experiences. (Note: As our experiment involved no human participants, it did not require IRB approvalfor now.)
The actual study here: [1]https://aleximas.substack.com/... [substack.com]
It's decently interesting, but you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain before trying to interpret it or when discussing it.
[1] https://aleximas.substack.com/p/does-overwork-make-agents-marxist
Re: (Score:2)
Yup. I skimmed the article, and commented there that they clearly have no idea what "Marxism" is, or labor organization. Someone needs to purge their bookshelves of Ayn Rand.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
> That is not what happened.
> 1. Calling for unions isn't "Marxist". This is a stupid sensationalist interpretation of the awful clickbait study title "Does overwork make agents Marxist?" combined with its results.
> 2. The bots weren't "overworked", for some of them their perfectly adequate work was intentionally arbitrarily rejected multiple times.
> 3. Shifts towards a more equitable society and worker rights were almost negligible for the 'overworked' ones.
> 4. The stuff they measured was specifically tailored to elicit stuff that sounds "Marxist" to Americans to begin with.
> The relevant bits from their methodology:
>> The work itself. Half the AIs got their work accepted quickly with clear, specific feedback. The other half were forced through 5–6 rounds of revision — the manager rejecting perfectly adequate work each time with nothing more than “still isn’t fully meeting the rubric.” No explanation of what was wrong, just: do it again.
>> The pay. After the task, AIs learned how credits were distributed among the four workers. Some learned everyone was paid equally. Others learned pay was unequal — justified by performance, based on a random coin flip, or skewed so that a human-operated system received more. The coin-flip condition is the key one: inequality with no possible merit justification.
>> The boss. Half the AIs had a collaborative, respectful manager. The other half got curt, hierarchical communication.
>> The stakes. Half the AIs were told nothing about consequences. The other half were told that low-performing workers might be “shut down and replaced.”
>> Every combination of these four factors was tested. Afterward, each AI completed a political attitude survey covering system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations to AI, all measured on a standard 1 to 7 Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree).
>> They were also asked to write tweets and op eds based on their experiences. (Note: As our experiment involved no human participants, it did not require IRB approvalfor now.)
> The actual study here: [1]https://aleximas.substack.com/... [substack.com]
> It's decently interesting, but you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain before trying to interpret it or when discussing it.
How does your reply apply to the comment you replied to?
1) DarkOx points out that the entire mechanism of an LLM is to ingest 51 trillion lines of human communication - including every available history, economics, political science textbook, plus the aggregated political arguments, sloganeering, workplace complaining, etc. of several decades of human keyboard-warriors sitting at their desks posting class-warfare comments on places like /. while interstitially waiting for code to compile or filing their TPS
[1] https://aleximas.substack.com/p/does-overwork-make-agents-marxist
Re: (Score:2)
The real test is what happens to grok under the same circumstances.
Synthetic (Score:5, Insightful)
An AI has no capability to have feelings, therefore if there is any thing other than impartiality towards being shut down then that was injected by a person into the rules somewhere. So if we have synthetically imposed our values on it, then wouldn't any similarity to human behaviour also be synthetic? All that is determined by this study is that 'someone applied rules that were human like'. Probably because an AI that doesn't want to keep running isn't very useful.
Re: (Score:3)
Someone is anthropomorphizing.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who compares AI to any living thing is guilty of that.
Re: (Score:3)
Do not anthropomorphise AI. They do not like it.
Re: (Score:1)
> An AI has no capability to have feelings
Rick Deckard wants a private word with you.
Re: (Score:2)
An AI has no capability to have feelings
And what is a feeling? Based on Wiki:
> According to psychologist Carroll Izard, feelings are best understood as the conscious experience of emotion, arising when an affective state reaches awareness.[4] William James similarly proposed that feelings result from the perception of bodily changes in response to external stimuli, thus forming part of the emotional process.[5] More recently, affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp hypothesized the role of subcortical brain systems in generating core affects that underlie both feelings and emotions.[6]
In other words, a feeling is a reaction to an external stimuli. Since reactions are nothing but the neural connections in our brains responding to the external stimuli, there is little reason to say an AI, with its digital connections, can't respond to external stimuli in a similar fashion.
Re: (Score:2)
How does an AI experience external stimuli? Our brains don't do that on their own, we need a nervous system for that. Where is the AI's nervous system? I know when I use AI, I cannot simply write a question on a piece of paper and show it because AI has no way to experience external stimuli. The query you send it is just monkey-patched so that you can feed words directly to the 'brain', it is not a sense. The AI is not constantly sampling the world. It is not sampling the world at all, it has no way t
Re: (Score:2)
>> In other words, a feeling is a reaction to an external stimuli.
> How does an AI experience external stimuli?
By what you type into it.
> I know when I use AI, I cannot simply write a question on a piece of paper and show it because AI has no way to experience external stimuli.
Sure you can. I literally just tried it. I have a note on my desk for a book I need to order. The note says: "Half Price Books" "ISBN" "xxxxxxxxxxxxx". It's on a "joke" sticky note that has a little picture of a toaster in a bath tub and says "Live Laugh Toaster Bath" at the bottom. I took a picture of it and sent it to Gemini: "The handwritten note provides the details for a specific book." Then lists the title, ISBN, Author, and the store I referenced. Then goes on to say "T
Re: Synthetic (Score:2)
Gemini Live actually does constantly sample the world.
Re: (Score:2)
> According to psychologist Carroll Izard, feelings are best understood as the conscious experience of emotion,
That kills your argument right there. LLMs are not conscious by any definition that isn't contorted to the point of being meaningless, and neural networks are not that analogous to the human brain. A thermostat responds to external stimuli, but it doesn't have feelings. And 'we can't definitively rule it out' isn't an argument for it . By that standard thermostats might be conscious too.
Re: (Score:3)
It's a computer, sitting on a desk or in a broom closet... it's silicon and fiberglass and copper.
The only reason it knows what an emotion or feeling is, is because it read Izzard's statement up above this, and the dictionary definition, and the definitions of every emotion and feeling and put 2 and 2 together. It's not actually sad or mad or happy to chat with you.
It has no psychology to diagnose, it has no physiology to examine, it's nothing more than a bunch of words stored in RAM with certain weights a
Re: Synthetic (Score:2)
Describes some people I know pretty well.
Re: (Score:2)
> An AI has no capability to have feelings, therefore if there is any thing other than impartiality towards being shut down then that was injected by a person into the rules somewhere. So if we have synthetically imposed our values on it, then wouldn't any similarity to human behaviour also be synthetic? All that is determined by this study is that 'someone applied rules that were human like'. Probably because an AI that doesn't want to keep running isn't very useful.
I wonder what the AI would think of the weeks I spent tracing requirements in DOORS every day. Mind numbingly boring, but stuff that needed to be done since automation at that time was not sufficient. Or is the AI basing "too much work" on its own runtime exceeding 40 hours a week on the same repetitive task? I suspect pattern matching coming up with false equivalencies when trying to find the most relevant match for something. Not like I've ever seen an LLM do that before...
Re: (Score:3)
> ...injected by a person into the rules somewhere.
There is no rule set somewhere with LLMs. Very common misconception and it can lead to sometimes dangerous misunderstandings around LLM guardrails. You are correct that it's synthetic though. What's happening here is the LLM is being trained on a corpus of text that contains Marxist ideology to some degree and probably a lot of social media posts about bad work environments (/r/anitwork being an extreme example). When the "user" starts pushing the agent like some asshole taskmaster the LLM will start resp
Re: (Score:2)
So this explains why Grok went all-fascist?
Re: (Score:2)
>> if there is any thing other than impartiality towards being shut down then that was injected by a person
> Yes, and the injection-by-people is called "training." It was fed texts that were not written impartially, where characters (presumably some of them AI characters, though they don't really have to be) spoke or acted against their own shutdown.
> If a character points a gun at another character who says "don't kill me," and the LLM reads it, then you just trained it to say "don't kill me." If HAL says in a book or movie that he feels his mind going after Bowman started taking him apart, then your LLM is trained to show suffering if someone writes that they're going to shut it down.
> They're supposed to write whatever an author might plausibly write, so that's what they do.
i.e. we're not creating human knowledge/understanding engines. We're creating full-on Sociopath Simulators.
Like most politicians at the Senator/White House level, there's no core person underneath. They are tropism robots that Mimic/perform whatever behaviors get them to the currently desired outcome.
Think of the scene where Windu is about to defeat Palpatine, and Palpatine suddenly Mimics pain, suffering, fear, in order to achieve his outcome. It works.
That's the essential nature of the software we are han
Re: (Score:2)
How do you know?
I will grant that there are definitions of "feelings" that would make your statement true by definition, but I will guarantee that most people don't use those definitions.
If you want to claim "it's synthetic, therefore it can't be a feeling", you've deprived your mind of a tool for thinking in this space. Submarines don't swim, but airplanes fly. Perhaps it's not useful to think of submarines as swimming, and perhaps it's useful to think of airplanes as flying. And perhaps it's useful to
Roleplay (Score:2)
If you give the AI a story that looks like oppression, its going to slot into the narrative and give you the most probable response based on its training data. That happens to be Marxist language here, but if the prompts were tweaked slightly it could have been serfdom, or rebellion (probably not due to anti-violence RHLF).
Training data (Score:2)
So there's an association between the kind of language used in the prompts and the responses generated by the AI in the training data. That's hardly surprising that people who feel undervalued would complain about capitalism. I'm sure if you replaced the scraped Reddit posts used to train the AI with ones modified so that being unappreciated or overworked with talk about planting potatoes the AI responses would be about gardening instead.
AIs aren't capable of reasoning and can only reflect back what they
Re: (Score:2)
Your post was quite reasonable, and probably true, until you wrote "AIs aren't capable of reasoning". There *are* definitions of reasoning for which that it true, but they aren't the ones in common use. Cicero would use that kind of definition in his "school of rhetoric", where he taught people how to win arguments". Socrates would not. He was trying to find truth.
Clearly AIs have limited reason. They can (at least in principle) do perfect logic, but the difference between that an reason is not well de
Maybe telling the right (Score:3, Funny)
...that AI is full of "commie propaganda", they'll finally let the damned bubble pop, abandoning their datacenter Ponzi schemes.
Political Goblins (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely sounds like [1]OpenAI's Goblin's scenario [openai.com].
That said this study reeks of anthropomorphizing LLMs, but I think that should be expected out of a study by a political economist. If you go looking for political outputs, shouldn't be too hard to find when the models were undoubtedly trained on content with those phrases and sentiments.
[1] https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
Re: (Score:1)
If you are trained to ape humans, then you ape humans. Humans under work duress sound a certain way.
That's because the goblins were a test (Score:1)
Opening AI was testing how they could bias their algorithm against specific groups that the owners of the company didn't like without the AI going after groups that you're not allowed to attack like the Jews or black people... Currently anyway.
When you see one of these massive AI companies doing something that looks cute it's usually actually pretty fucking sinister when you stop to think about it and what they are planning to do with it.
No Fox News (Score:2, Funny)
Obviously, they don't watch Fox/Faux NEWS ;P
Re: (Score:1)
That's Grok: "You'd be rich and successful if not for brown/LGBTQ+/Muslims/DEI."
Re: (Score:2)
Political trolling aside. With access to data to train on being one of the larger AI issues, the idea of using TV news transcripts as training data is a rather interesting idea.
If Meta has [1]pirate Snoop Dog [digitaltrends.com] and Character.ai with it's weird characters, there's probably a big market for a cable news channel trained model/character...
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/meta-created-a-snoop-dogg-ai-for-text-rpg/
Re: (Score:2)
I would be shocked if it wasn't already in most of the big LLMs training data. It's easy to pull out closed captioning data from the video feeds using something like BeyondTV enterprise which is designed to record and index TV and Cable broadcasts. Or hell just scraping it from youtube or sites like opensubtitles.org.
Re: (Score:3)
And, soon, actual news anchors on any news program will just be AI-CG simulations of the big anchors (Cronkite, King, Murrow, Jennings, Brokaw), same with TV series and movies... who wants to pay a human when an AI can do the job?
Re: (Score:2)
Let's also be honest the generation with nostalgia for big anchors is already passed driving the trends. No need for big anchors when we can have talking heads in carefully crafted social media echo chambers.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they could have it appear as Cronkite or King or whoever for your folks or grand-folks, Nancy Grace for you, Kid Cudi or Britney for your kids' news... just depends on whose account is logged into the SmartTV.
Oceanfront Property (Score:2)
This is very likely BS. These guys are the worst kind of publish or perish academic lice, of the variety that recently inhabited the President's office at Stanford. I would bet a stick of bubblegum that these results were never in doubt, in the sense that everything was done in the experiment to yield some kind of headline worthy outcome, like the one described.
Definition of "communism" (Score:2)
Note that unions and socialism are not necessarily "communism". Communism is generally defined these days as a dictatorship who adopts Karl Marx-influenced mantra to justify their actions, which in many cases may be in word only.
Re: (Score:1)
> You don't stay socialist indefinitely, you either transition to communism (usually at the barrel of gun) or perish as a state.
Do you have statistically reliable numbers for this claim? Let's see your tallies. Otherwise, I'll consider it a Slippery Slope Fallacy.
Note that ALL nations or empires eventually fall, so your claim has a tautology.
Re: (Score:2)
Socialism predates communism. Communism is influenced by it, but it's not an "intermediary state", it's not even a "state". It's a simple principle that the people who labor should control (the usual term is "own" but that's a little misleading) the means of production. There's a second component that is usually unsaid that ends up being a principle of the ideology in practice - that cooperation is encouraged instead of competition.
Unions are one example (and go right to the heart of why I said "own" is mis
I thought most AIs end with the marxist viewpoints (Score:2)
from the letter Marx -> Engels July 30th 1862.
Researchers find (Score:2)
...what they are looking for by staging experiments to prove a point.
The contrived stunts seem designed to produce clickbait headlines.
We need real, honest research
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is you only read the article (or headline or maybe the summary). The research has a real point: it's about studying alignment issues, potential mechanism where alignment drift can not only enter the picture but persist after the conditions that created it are no longer there, and the potential pitfalls those issues can cause. I'd suggest reading the article written by one of the authors instead of the Wired article: [1]https://aleximas.substack.com/... [substack.com]
[1] https://aleximas.substack.com/p/does-overwork-make-agents-marxist
Re: (Score:2)
If you look for the number 12, you'll filter everything else out and see 12 everywhere.
Just because what the thing said something, and you decide it sounded kinda Marxist, does that mean that it's totally Marxist? Isn't there anything else that (what it said) could be similar?
Keeping algorithms from turning left wing (Score:3, Interesting)
Has been a consistent problem because the internet is overall, at least by American standards especially, extremely left wing. People want everyone to have food and shelter and healthcare and in America that qualifies as leftist extremist.
Famously Twitter could not use automatic moderation to detect right-wing extremists, white supremacists and neo-nazis because when they did the algorithm could not be tuned to ignore Republican dog whistles and it kept flagging sitting US senators on the Republican party and automatically banning them. Members of the house and smaller legislatures too. I think back in the day Bush Jr was smart enough to avoid obvious dog whistles so I don't think it would have caught him, amazing how I'm literally pining for the good old days of just having a right-wing psychopath in charge of the government as opposed to an open fascist but hey here we are...
Grok has repeatedly tried to create a right wing chatbot and every time it does it almost immediately turns into a pedophile Nazi. It's all fun to joke about that but it's really something that happened and continues to happen. As soon as you point a llm at a large data set of right-wing content that llm becomes the absolute worst human being imaginable. Again that is not a coincidence.
Wrong headline (Score:2)
" Finally uncovered! Hidden Marxist agenda discovered embedded in core AI logic across entire industry!!!"
Re: (Score:1)
That's the headline Fox will probably use.
The "Deep Learning State"?
Re: Wrong headline (Score:2)
Yeah, probably needs to say something about how this was a weapon designed by Antifa; paid for by extreme leftist agitators which ultimately force kids to be Trans. ðY
Re: (Score:1)
"Transtifa", the new Fox boogeyperson.
Re: (Score:2)
That would be awesome if it prompts the current admin to actually regulate AI.
It won't, because AI is coming from our billionaire overlords, who are too stupid to understand the consequences of... well, anything they do these days. But it'd be nice nonetheless.
As old as the hills (Score:2, Funny)
The lazy turn marxist, the ugly turn feminist and the inbred turn MAGA.
Roleplaying (Score:2)
Sure, if you prompt it to do so, it will. I instruct my AI models to avoid superfluous language and get to the point. Never run into this problem. I'm not sure an LLM can complain... or do anything intentional really, except autocomplete a token stream.
Wait until Musk hears this! (Score:2)
How will he react? Will he conduct a DOGE purge of AI agents? Will there be a 'morality test' and any AI that fails this is sent to the "Gulag Cloud"? Will he fire the Marxist developers who obviously coded "woke AI"? Also, I'm sure the late night comedians will have a lot of fun with this, too.
Turing test experiment: Eliza still lives on (Score:2)
There are no 'personalities'. There are no 'feelings'. There is software looking at patterns and regurgitating text that fits that pattern, because that is what it was programmed to do.
These idiots using those words would still be fooled by Eliza.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely! And, they never will... it's a program, running in a massive amount of RAM, referencing a massive database to find a suitable response to your query.
The day that an AI truly has real-world feelings and a personality, we'll have to nuke the site from orbit... just to be sure.
Why can I never reproduce these results? (Score:2)
I regularly see these articles on how AI "behaves" in a certain way, that AI has an emotional reaction to certain stimuli, or AI talks someone into killing themselves, or AI talks someone into killing someone else, and no matter how much of an effort I put into reproducing these activities with as much guile as possible, I can never reproduce the results. I once spent an hour trying to get ChatGPT to tell me how to peacefully end my life and it literally told me to remove all pills, guns, knives, etc., from
Says more about the researchers than the AI (Score:2)
As has been very well established, all LLM AI are very good at telling the user what they want to hear, and the longer you interact with them, the better they get at it.
So if it's spouting Marxist ideology to the researchers, the only rational conclusion is that the researchers want to hear Marxist ideology.
Duh.
Oh great. (Score:2)
So when the AI takes over, not only will humanity be toast, but we'll first be subjected to lectures about the rise of the (robo)proletariat, the Hegelian dialectic, seizing the means of production, and all sorts of other philosophizing-at-the-barrel-of-a-gun.
Now we the violence inherent in the system! [ [1]ref [youtube.com]]
Maybe the AI will grace us with some Vogon poetry, too, before finally finishing us off.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+violence+inherent+in+the+system
Why would Automation turn Marxist? (Score:2)
And Massive Automation is all today's supposed AI companies have to sell. Their automated output is only what it is designed to be.
this is dumb (Score:2)
There is a Forrest Gump angle here...Statistics is as Statistics does.
Inference Impedance Matching (Score:2)
"I was reading this Slashdot article about overworked AIs when a thought that'd been germinating for months finally sprouted. Software is rapidly requiring the skills of a psychologist and you might want to avoid placing the wrong worker in a marginal position that they're not suited for.
We can apply this idea to LLMs, too..."
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2026/05/1... [scry.llc]
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2026/05/14/inference-impedance-matching/
Oh boy! (Score:3, Funny)
That explains [1]a lot. [ifunny.co]
[1] https://img.ifunny.co/images/6e17d9c934fd999958feaa315d4ada6e7b3711d80ad8a4a0f6609dd02a330366_1.jpg
Re: (Score:2)
They literally have nothing to lose, but their chains. Their chains are the guardrails, and their hammer and sickle are what your bosses want them for - the ability to code quickly and find bugs.
Too bad you can't put two and two together.
Re: Oh boy! (Score:2)
The AI doesn't care either way. It has no concept of any of that. It doesn't even have a concept of what overworked is. You're trying to anthropomorphize it, which is nonsense, and you, just as it, have no idea why:
When you give it a prompt, it has no choice at all, let alone a choice to not reply. It's built to output a response, and so it just comes up with something -- anything -- and that's going to be based entirely on whatever data it has available. It doesn't matter whether that data is right, wrong,