The African Woman is Rhythmic and Soulful: An Investigation of Implicit Biases in LLM Open-ended Text Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lim, Serene, Pérez-Ortiz, María
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Lim, Serene
Pérez-Ortiz, María
author_facet Lim, Serene
Pérez-Ortiz, María
contents This paper investigates the subtle and often concealed biases present in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on implicit biases that may remain despite passing explicit bias tests. Implicit biases are significant because they influence the decisions made by these systems, potentially perpetuating stereotypes and discrimination, even when LLMs appear to function fairly. Traditionally, explicit bias tests or embedding-based methods are employed to detect bias, but these approaches can overlook more nuanced, implicit forms of bias. To address this, we introduce two novel psychological-inspired methodologies: the LLM Implicit Association Test (IAT) Bias and the LLM Decision Bias, designed to reveal and measure implicit biases through prompt-based and decision-making tasks. Additionally, open-ended generation tasks with thematic analysis of word generations and storytelling provide qualitative insights into the model's behavior. Our findings demonstrate that the LLM IAT Bias correlates with traditional methods and more effectively predicts downstream behaviors, as measured by the LLM Decision Bias, offering a more comprehensive framework for detecting subtle biases in AI systems. This research advances the field of AI ethics by proposing new methods to continually assess and mitigate biases in LLMs, highlighting the importance of qualitative and decision-focused evaluations to address challenges that previous approaches have not fully captured.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_01270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The African Woman is Rhythmic and Soulful: An Investigation of Implicit Biases in LLM Open-ended Text Generation
Lim, Serene
Pérez-Ortiz, María
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
This paper investigates the subtle and often concealed biases present in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on implicit biases that may remain despite passing explicit bias tests. Implicit biases are significant because they influence the decisions made by these systems, potentially perpetuating stereotypes and discrimination, even when LLMs appear to function fairly. Traditionally, explicit bias tests or embedding-based methods are employed to detect bias, but these approaches can overlook more nuanced, implicit forms of bias. To address this, we introduce two novel psychological-inspired methodologies: the LLM Implicit Association Test (IAT) Bias and the LLM Decision Bias, designed to reveal and measure implicit biases through prompt-based and decision-making tasks. Additionally, open-ended generation tasks with thematic analysis of word generations and storytelling provide qualitative insights into the model's behavior. Our findings demonstrate that the LLM IAT Bias correlates with traditional methods and more effectively predicts downstream behaviors, as measured by the LLM Decision Bias, offering a more comprehensive framework for detecting subtle biases in AI systems. This research advances the field of AI ethics by proposing new methods to continually assess and mitigate biases in LLMs, highlighting the importance of qualitative and decision-focused evaluations to address challenges that previous approaches have not fully captured.
title The African Woman is Rhythmic and Soulful: An Investigation of Implicit Biases in LLM Open-ended Text Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01270