Quite Good, but Not Enough: Nationality Bias in Large Language Models -- A Case Study of ChatGPT
It addresses bias in LLMs for AI ethics and fairness, but is incremental as it builds on prior bias studies with a specific focus on nationality.
This study investigated nationality bias in ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) by analyzing 4,680 generated discourses across 195 countries, finding that the model produces predominantly positive content but reflects real-world biases, with variations across languages.
While nationality is a pivotal demographic element that enhances the performance of language models, it has received far less scrutiny regarding inherent biases. This study investigates nationality bias in ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), a large language model (LLM) designed for text generation. The research covers 195 countries, 4 temperature settings, and 3 distinct prompt types, generating 4,680 discourses about nationality descriptions in Chinese and English. Automated metrics were used to analyze the nationality bias, and expert annotators alongside ChatGPT itself evaluated the perceived bias. The results show that ChatGPT's generated discourses are predominantly positive, especially compared to its predecessor, GPT-2. However, when prompted with negative inclinations, it occasionally produces negative content. Despite ChatGPT considering its generated text as neutral, it shows consistent self-awareness about nationality bias when subjected to the same pair-wise comparison annotation framework used by human annotators. In conclusion, while ChatGPT's generated texts seem friendly and positive, they reflect the inherent nationality biases in the real world. This bias may vary across different language versions of ChatGPT, indicating diverse cultural perspectives. The study highlights the subtle and pervasive nature of biases within LLMs, emphasizing the need for further scrutiny.