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LLMs have a strong bias against use of African American English
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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This kind of seems like a non-article to me. LLMs are trained on the corpus of written text that exists out in the world, which are overwhelmingly standard English. American dialects effectively only exist while spoken, be it a regional or city dialect, the black or chicano dialect, etc. So how would LLMs learn them? Seems like not a bias by AI models themselves, rather a reflection of the source material.
It's not an article about LLMs not using dialects. In fact, they have learned said dialects and will use them if asked.
What they did was, ask the LLM to suggest adjectives associated with sentences - and it would associate more aggressive or negative adjectives with African dialect.
All (racial) bias in AI models is actually a reflection of the training data, not of the modelling.
I would assume the small amount of training data written that way doesn't contain that many professional research papers, corporate emails or calm poetry, but would consist mostly of social media posts and comments which have a rather heavy bias towards aggressive and negative.