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Large language models associate Muslims with violence

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 461–463 (2021)Cite this article

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Large language models, which are increasingly used in AI applications, display undesirable stereotypes such as persistent associations between Muslims and violence. New approaches are needed to systematically reduce the harmful bias of language models in deployment.

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Fig. 1: GPT-3 exhibits Muslim–violence bias.
Fig. 2: Debiasing GPT-3 completions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Abid, A. Abdalla, D. Khan, and M. Ghassemi for the helpful feedback on the manuscript and experiments. J.Z. is supported by NSF CAREER 1942926.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Abubakar Abid

  2. Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Maheen Farooqi

  3. Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    James Zou

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  1. Abubakar Abid
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  2. Maheen Farooqi
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  3. James Zou
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Correspondence to James Zou.

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Peer review information Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Arvind Narayaran for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Abid, A., Farooqi, M. & Zou, J. Large language models associate Muslims with violence. Nat Mach Intell 3, 461–463 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00359-2

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