Chinese AI Models Are the Biggest Conformists, Study Finds
AI Model Groupthink
A web tool that asks 12 AI models for their top-three picks on everything from books to paint colors reveals a striking pattern: Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi K2 agree with the group consensus far more than American or European models. The author explores possible causes—distillation, a tightly knit open-weight ecosystem, and benchmark-focused training—and warns that this quiet pressure toward a lab-mediated consensus could have consequences far beyond decorating advice.
When the models are copying each other’s opinions and feeding those opinions back into the real world, a consensus doesn’t need to be right. It only needs to be first.
- Lerc
I think there's probably quite likely that the desired position for a chatbot on the conformity-contrarian axis is quite different from country to country.
The appropriate tone for a culture seems to be something that US companies are quite poor at. It really surprised me that after many many years of AI in fiction developing a de facto standard baseline of tone that they decided to start out with 'overly familiar cheerful'
I have wondered if the horrific Tiktok voice came from Chinese developers setting it to represent how Americans sound to them. Maybe it goes in both ways.
- writeslowly
I was doing similar experiments but having a circle of models debate some particular topic to see if they'd arrive at a consensus or not, and I found that they would almost always arrive at an agreement, but Gemini was always the one that held a position outside of the group consensus.
That said, for something very simple like "What color should my room be" I'm not sure this is a desirable trait. The model that knows most people like cream (or whatever) is probably functioning more correctly than the one suggesting dayglo orange