Andrew Smart

Andrew Smart, Ben Hutchinson, Lameck Mbangula Amugongo et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly increased in size and apparent capabilities in the last three years, but their training data is largely English text. There is growing interest in multilingual LLMs, and various efforts are striving for models to accommodate languages of communities outside of the Global North, which include many languages that have been historically underrepresented in digital realms. These languages have been coined as "low resource languages" or "long-tail languages", and LLMs performance on these languages is generally poor. While expanding the use of LLMs to more languages may bring many potential benefits, such as assisting cross-community communication and language preservation, great care must be taken to ensure that data collection on these languages is not extractive and that it does not reproduce exploitative practices of the past. Collecting data from languages spoken by previously colonized people, indigenous people, and non-Western languages raises many complex sociopolitical and ethical questions, e.g., around consent, cultural safety, and data sovereignty. Furthermore, linguistic complexity and cultural nuances are often lost in LLMs. This position paper builds on recent scholarship, and our own work, and outlines several relevant social, cultural, and ethical considerations and potential ways to mitigate them through qualitative research, community partnerships, and participatory design approaches. We provide twelve recommendations for consideration when collecting language data on underrepresented language communities outside of the Global North.

Noam Benkler, Drisana Mosaphir, Scott Friedman et al.

The fields of AI current lacks methods to quantitatively assess and potentially alter the moral values inherent in the output of large language models (LLMs). However, decades of social science research has developed and refined widely-accepted moral value surveys, such as the World Values Survey (WVS), eliciting value judgments from direct questions in various geographies. We have turned those questions into value statements and use NLP to compute to how well popular LLMs are aligned with moral values for various demographics and cultures. While the WVS is accepted as an explicit assessment of values, we lack methods for assessing implicit moral and cultural values in media, e.g., encountered in social media, political rhetoric, narratives, and generated by AI systems such as LLMs that are increasingly present in our daily lives. As we consume online content and utilize LLM outputs, we might ask, which moral values are being implicitly promoted or undercut, or -- in the case of LLMs -- if they are intending to represent a cultural identity, are they doing so consistently? In this paper we utilize a Recognizing Value Resonance (RVR) NLP model to identify WVS values that resonate and conflict with a given passage of output text. We apply RVR to the text generated by LLMs to characterize implicit moral values, allowing us to quantify the moral/cultural distance between LLMs and various demographics that have been surveyed using the WVS. In line with other work we find that LLMs exhibit several Western-centric value biases; they overestimate how conservative people in non-Western countries are, they are less accurate in representing gender for non-Western countries, and portray older populations as having more traditional values. Our results highlight value misalignment and age groups, and a need for social science informed technological solutions addressing value plurality in LLMs.