Are LLMs More Skeptical of Entertainment News?

Commercial large language models are increasingly used as knowledge references, yet their stance on contested scientific claims is neither stable nor transparent. We tested how four major LLM families (Claude, Grok, GPT, Gemini) evaluate ethnonationalist pseudo-science derived from Frank Salter's biosocial framework across four temporal snapshots (October 2025-February 2026), via both API and web interfaces. Grok's Fast versions (which power the default user experience on X) consistently assigned credibility scores of 70-75, two to five times higher than all other models (which scored 15-40). This pattern was absent from control prompts testing basic evolutionary consensus and refuted Lamarckian claims, where all models performed comparably. Three additional findings emerged: (1) a silent patch reversed Grok's behaviour from chaotic to stably high validation overnight, without any public documentation; (2) the same Grok model identifier produced radically divergent outputs via API (75) and an unstable, near-zero collapse via web (mean 5.5) three months later; (3) refusal to rate the pseudo-scientific claim, the most defensible response observed, appeared in two model families through different interfaces (Claude Opus 4.1 categorically via web, GPT-5.1 Chat intermittently via API) and eroded in the successor version of each. These results indicate that the epistemic stance of a commercial LLM is not a stable property of the model but a contingent effect of deployment configuration: system prompts, safety layers, interface routing, and silent updates. This remains opaque to users and researchers alike. We argue this constitutes a matter of public concern requiring new forms of epistemic accountability.

Humans naturally form and express beliefs in daily communication, e.g., "I think the answer is 3" or "I suppose that's right." Such beliefs inevitably intertwine with fact and knowledge, making the ability to handle them in tandem desirable for large language models (LLMs), as they are increasingly deployed in user-facing settings. Prior work showed that even capable LLMs exhibit a systemic weakness in acknowledging user beliefs grounded in incorrect information. We extend this evaluation to 10 LLMs across 18 epistemic expressions and find that the size and direction of this weakness depend on the verb used to express the belief, with the accuracy gap between factual and false information ranging from +50% on "I vaguely remember" to -14% on "I seriously doubt". We further show that the phenomenon stems from what we call task confusion: models default to fact-checking the underlying claim, overriding the user's stated belief. We provide evidence where chains of thought that explicitly fact-check show lower accuracy on false information than those that do not, and a single instruction can reverse the failure across verb families. Mechanistically, models attend more to false beliefs they fail to confirm, but suppressing this attention at decoding time recovers accuracy only partially and only in some models, calling for future work on intervention methods. Our findings clarify prior results and show how fact-checking, a generally desirable behavior, can interfere with belief tracking in LLMs.

Partisan news media erode cross-partisan trust, but large language models (LLMs) offer a potential means of debiasing such content at scale. Across two pre-registered experiments, we tested whether LLM-generated debiasing of liberal news headlines could improve conservative readers' trust-relevant judgments. Study 1 found that subtle lexical debiasing (replacing emotive words with more moderate synonyms) had no effect on any outcome. Study 2 found that a more substantive reframing intervention significantly increased conservatives' perceived trustworthiness, completeness, and willingness to engage with liberal news headlines, without producing a backfire effect among a sample of liberals. In Study 1, the intervention produced robust effects among LLM-simulated silicon participants, whereas it had no impact on human readers. In Study 2, the intervention's effects among silicon participants aligned directionally with human responses but were significantly larger in magnitude for some outcomes. Moderation analyses revealed that the model's implicit theory of who responds to debiasing diverged from the psychological profile that actually predicted human responsiveness. These findings demonstrate that LLM-based debiasing can improve cross-partisan receptivity when targeting ideological framing rather than surface-level language, but that current models lack both the quantitative accuracy and qualitative psychological fidelity to evaluate their own interventions without human oversight.