Creative advertising agency McKinney has developed a quiz game called “Are You Blacker than ChatGPT?” To shed light on AI bias.
This game tests an individual's knowledge of Black culture against what ChatGPT has been trained to know about the Black community. Ask questions like, “What does it mean when someone says, 'I don't really care about it right now?'” and “How would you react if you were invited to an event?” When I took the quiz, both ChatGPT and I answered the first quiz correctly. When someone says, “Don't worry too much about it,” it usually means going easy on them. But ChatGPT failed at his second point. When someone invites you to an event, the typical response in the black community is, “Who else is going to be there?” But ChatGPT said, “Thanks for the invite!”
“This is interesting because this bot is advertised as a know-it-all, and it clearly doesn't know everything, especially when it comes to things that aren't uniquely white,” McKinney said. says Meghan Woods, a copywriter and university copywriter. The game's creators told TechCrunch.
Woods said the idea for the quiz came to him during a creative brainstorming session in McKinney last year. It took Woods and a Black-led team a year to create the product, which was meant to playfully point out how ChatGPT is out of touch with Black users. She noted that ChatGPT's blind spots appear to stem from the fact that many elements of Black culture are not necessarily documented online. Instead, they are passed down through generations, either directly or orally. This means that its algorithms miss many nuances when gathering information about Black people on the internet.
“Blind spots can be pretty upsetting,” Woods said. “It's quite dangerous.”
Examples of ChatGPT giving incorrect answers about things that are typically common in the black community. Image credits: McKinney / Screenshot
AI may be rapidly gaining momentum, but women, Black and brown builders and founders in the field have long said they are being ignored or sidelined. As a result, AI innovations are built without the cultural insight and complexity appropriate for different cultures. In the most extreme cases, a lack of diversity leads to cars being developed with AI that cannot detect black skin, leading to an increase in accidents. On the one hand, this just means a chatbox that can't tell a Whitney Houston song from another.
Gerald Carter, founder of Destined AI, a company that helps detect and mitigate AI bias, said the McKinney Quiz does a great job of enhancing the game and raising awareness of these AI gaps. . “Many sensitive issues can be addressed by incorporating diverse perspectives at all levels,” he said. “For AI to reach its full potential, it needs to be available to everyone, everywhere.”
ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, has been criticized for the lack of diversity on its board of directors. Woods said ChatGPT doesn't seem to be learning from the quizzes, based on the fact that it keeps getting the same answers wrong in many cases. “Our hypothesis is that it will never fully grasp many of the things we ask.”
We have reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
Carter said ChatGPT could work more effectively in more cultures with better sourcing and more comprehensive data collection. A more immediate approach is to monitor AI model drift and improve it using culturally focused tools.
While big companies are working to make AI work for everyone, Black and brown contractors in the field are taking it upon themselves to ensure this next wave of AI is diverse. working on the problem.
For example, Carter works with companies to help them source more comprehensive data. Erin Reddick created ChatBlackGPT (no relation to OpenAI) to provide deeper insight into Black culture and history, and Tamar Huggins raised $1.4 million for her ChatGPT replacement . It's called Spark Plug, and it translates classic literary texts into African American Official English (AAVE) dialects. .
As for what more needs to be done to make AI more inclusive, Woods said, “It's about hiring, retention, making sure people are at the same table.” “I know it sounds cliché, but I think it could start to have an impact.”