A "Perspectival" Mirror of the Elephant: Investigating Language Bias on Google, ChatGPT, YouTube, and Wikipedia

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Luo, Queenie, Puett, Michael J., Smith, Michael D.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866929268128219136
author Luo, Queenie
Puett, Michael J.
Smith, Michael D.
author_facet Luo, Queenie
Puett, Michael J.
Smith, Michael D.
contents Contrary to Google Search's mission of delivering information from "many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world," we find that Google and its most prominent returned results - Wikipedia and YouTube - simply reflect a narrow set of culturally dominant views tied to the search language for complex topics like "Buddhism," "Liberalism," "colonization," "Iran" and "America." Simply stated, they present, to varying degrees, distinct information across the same search in different languages, a phenomenon we call language bias. This paper presents evidence and analysis of language bias and discusses its larger social implications. We find that our online searches and emerging tools like ChatGPT turn us into the proverbial blind person touching a small portion of an elephant, ignorant of the existence of other cultural perspectives. Language bias sets a strong yet invisible cultural barrier online, where each language group thinks they can see other groups through searches, but in fact, what they see is their own reflection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_16281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A "Perspectival" Mirror of the Elephant: Investigating Language Bias on Google, ChatGPT, YouTube, and Wikipedia
Luo, Queenie
Puett, Michael J.
Smith, Michael D.
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Contrary to Google Search's mission of delivering information from "many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world," we find that Google and its most prominent returned results - Wikipedia and YouTube - simply reflect a narrow set of culturally dominant views tied to the search language for complex topics like "Buddhism," "Liberalism," "colonization," "Iran" and "America." Simply stated, they present, to varying degrees, distinct information across the same search in different languages, a phenomenon we call language bias. This paper presents evidence and analysis of language bias and discusses its larger social implications. We find that our online searches and emerging tools like ChatGPT turn us into the proverbial blind person touching a small portion of an elephant, ignorant of the existence of other cultural perspectives. Language bias sets a strong yet invisible cultural barrier online, where each language group thinks they can see other groups through searches, but in fact, what they see is their own reflection.
title A "Perspectival" Mirror of the Elephant: Investigating Language Bias on Google, ChatGPT, YouTube, and Wikipedia
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16281