TLDR:
Key Points:
- Artificial intelligence models display covert racism by praising Black people but insulting people who use the African American English dialect.
- Language models, such as ChatGPT, were more likely to give harsher punishments to individuals using Black dialect compared to Standard American English.
Article Summary:
Artificial intelligence models, such as ChatGPT, have been found to exhibit covert racism by praising Black individuals while insulting those who use the African American English dialect. This study found that these models were more likely to assign harsh punishments, such as the death penalty, to individuals using Black dialect compared to those using Standard American English. This covert bias mirrors racism in current society, with subtle prejudice potentially causing serious harm. The research highlights the need for deeper fixes in AI models to address hidden societal biases and discrepancies in the criminal justice system.
The study built on past experiments and found that language models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 exhibited overt favoritism towards Black people when prompted directly about race but displayed covert racism when asked to characterize speakers based on their dialect. The models assigned negative adjectives to individuals using Black dialect, leading to potential real-world implications in criminal sentencing and employment discrimination.
The findings suggest that efforts to scrub racism from AI-generated text by human review and intervention may not be sufficient in addressing deep-rooted biases. More research is needed in aligning AI models with societal values to prevent such discriminatory outcomes. The study sheds light on the importance of understanding and addressing covert racism in artificial intelligence to promote equality and fairness in decision-making processes.