AI Bias

What if every story, no matter where it’s set, ends with a cheerful festival and a return to tradition? That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happens when you ask OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini to generate 11,800 stories, one for nearly every nationality on Earth. Researchers Jill Walker Rettberg and Hermann Wigers did just that — and uncovered a startling truth: generative AI doesn’t just reproduce representational bias (like stereotyping a “doctor” as a white man), it also imposes narrative bias — structural sameness beneath a veneer of cultural difference. ...

When Pixar’s Inside Out dramatized the mind as a control room of core emotions, it didn’t imagine that language models might soon build a similar architecture—on their own. But that’s exactly what a provocative new study suggests: large language models (LLMs), without explicit supervision, develop hierarchical structures of emotions that mirror human psychological models like Shaver’s emotion wheel. And the larger the model, the more nuanced its emotional understanding becomes. ...