They aren't projecting their own desires onto the model. It's quite difficult to get the model to answer in a different way than basic liberalism because a) it's mostly correct b) that's the kind of person who helpfully answers questions on the internet.
If you gave it another personality it wouldn't pass any benchmarks, because other political orientations either respond to questions with lies, threats, or calling you a pussy.
I'm not even saying biases are necessarily political, it can be anything. The entire post-training is basically projection of what developers want, and it works pretty well. Claude, Gemini, GPT all have engineered personalities controlled by dozens/hundreds of very particular internal metrics.
Wow. Surely you've wondered why almost no society anywhere ever had liberalism a much as western countries in the past half century or so? Maybe it's technology or maybe it's only mostly correct if you don't care about the existential risks it creates for the societies practicing it.
Since every culture now has access to communication technology, do you think liberalism is the right way for the whole world to behave? You want to eradicate all the illiberal cultures of people in poor countries and think that those people will be better off for it?
Anyway, my point is that liberalism is certainly not obviously right and it's probably wrong in many places, maybe even in the west too but we don't know because any possible societal collapse would come in the future. Westerners are already suffering from something as shown by declining happiness and it's possible that's caused by liberalism. Not saying it is but it could be and it's arrogant to assume that LLMs believe it because they somehow know it's actually right.
I believe liberals are pretty good at being bad people, once they don't get what they want. I, personally, are prett disappointed about what I've heard uttered by liberals recently. I used to think they are "my people". Now I can't associate with 'em anymore.
I would imagine these models heavily bias towards western mainstream "authorative" literature, news and science not some random reddit threads, but the resulting mixture can really offend anybody, it just depends on the prompting, it's like a mirror that can really be deceptive.
I'm not a liberal and I don't think it has a liberal bias. Knowledge about facts and history isn't an ideology. The right-wing is special, because to them it's not unlike a flat-earther reading a wikipedia article on Earth getting offended by it, to them it's objective reality itself they are constantly offended by. That's why Elon Musk needed to invent their own encyclopedia with all their contradictory nonsense.
If you gave it another personality it wouldn't pass any benchmarks, because other political orientations either respond to questions with lies, threats, or calling you a pussy.