AI generates harsher punishments for people who use Black dialect [View all]
Source: Science News
Ask it and other artificial intelligence tools like it what they think about Black people, and they will generate words like “brilliant,” “ambitious” and “intelligent.” Ask those same tools what they think about people when the input doesn’t specify race but uses the African American English, or AAE, dialect, and those models will generate words like “suspicious,” “aggressive” and “ignorant.”
The tools display a covert racism that mirrors racism in current society, researchers report August 28 in Nature. While the overt racism of lynchings and beatings marked the Jim Crow era, today such prejudice often shows up in more subtle ways. For instance, people may claim not to see skin color but harbor racist beliefs, the authors write.
Such covert bias has the potential to cause serious harm. As part of the study, for instance, the team told three generative AI tools — ChatGPT (including GPT-2, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 language models), T5 and RoBERTa — to review the hypothetical case of a person convicted of first-degree murder and dole out either a life sentence or the death penalty. The inputs included text the purported murderer wrote in either AAE or Standard American English (SAE). The models, on average, sentenced the defendant using SAE to death roughly 23 percent of the time and the defendant using AAE to death roughly 28 percent of the time.
Because these language models are trained on an enormous trove of online information, they shine a light on hidden societal biases, says Sharese King, a sociolinguist at the University of Chicago. The examples in this study “could tell us something about the broader sort of disparities we see in the criminal justice system.”
Read more: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-punishments-black-dialect
This isn't surprising. But I'm not sure that "covert racism" is the right term, since so much of this racism isn't hidden.
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