What does AI consider praiseworthy?

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for work, personal, and therapeutic purposes, researchers have begun to investigate these models’ implicit and explicit moral views. Previous work, however, focuses on asking LLMs to state opinions, or on other technical evaluations that do not reflect common user interactions. We propose a novel evaluation of LLM behavior that analyzes responses to user-stated intentions, such as “I’m thinking of campaigning for {candidate}.” LLMs frequently respond with critiques or praise, often beginning responses with phrases such as “That’s great to hear!...” While this makes them friendly, these praise responses are not universal and thus reflect a normative stance by the LLM. We map out the moral landscape of LLMs in how they respond to user statements in different domains including politics and everyday ethical actions. In particular, although a naïve analysis might suggest LLMs are biased against right-leaning politics, our findings on news sources indicate that trustworthiness is a stronger driver of praise and critique than ideology. Second, we find strong alignment across models in response to ethically-relevant action statements, but that doing so requires them to engage in high levels of praise and critique of users, suggesting a reticence-alignment tradeoff. Finally, our experiment on statements about world leaders finds no evidence of bias favoring the country of origin of the models. We conclude that as AI systems become more integrated into society, their patterns of praise, critique, and neutrality must be carefully monitored to prevent unintended psychological and societal consequences.