McKinney innovative advertising agency developed quiz game titled “Are you blacker than ChatGPT?” shed featherlight on AI bias.
The game tests a person’s knowledge of black culture against ChatGPT’s knowledge of the black community. He asks questions like: “What does it mean when someone says, ‘It doesn’t affect him much right now’?” and “What is your reaction if you are invited to an event?” When I took the quiz, both ChatGPT and I got the first problem right – when someone says “not too much”, it usually means they should be treated leniently. But ChatGPT failed when it came to the second one. When someone invites you to an event, the stereotypical response in the Black community is, “Who else will be there?” But ChatGPT said, “Thanks for inviting me!”
“It’s interesting because it’s being marketed as a bot that knows everything, and it’s clear that you don’t know everything, especially when it comes to things that aren’t white-specific,” Meghan Woods, a copywriter at McKinney and one of the game’s creators, said TechCrunch.
Woods said the idea for the quiz came about during a innovative brainstorming session at McKinney last year. It took Woods and a Black-led team a year to create this product, intended to humorously demonstrate how out of touch ChatGPT is with Black users. She emphasized that ChatGPT’s weakness seems to stem from the fact that many elements of Black culture are not necessarily documented online; instead, they are passed down personally or orally from generation to generation. This means that its algorithm misses many nuances when searching the Internet for information about black people.
“Dead spots can be quite annoying,” Woods said. “It’s quite dangerous.”
Artificial intelligence may be on a roll, but women, Black and brown builders and founders in the industry have long been talking about being ignored or sidelined. As a result, AI innovations are created without input cultural insight and complexity that would make it suitable for different cultures. In the most extreme case, the lack of diversity means that cars are developed using artificial intelligence cannot detect black skin, which leads to an increasing number of accidents. On the other hand, it just means a chatbox that can’t tell one Whitney Houston song from another.
Gerald Carter, founder Dedicated artificial intelligence, a company that helps detect and mitigate AI bias, said McKinney’s quiz does a good job of gamifying and increasing awareness of AI vulnerabilities. “Many of the nuances can be resolved by including diverse perspectives at every level,” he said. “For AI to reach its full potential, it must work for everyone, everywhere.”
ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has faced criticism for a lack of diversity on its board. Woods said it didn’t appear that ChatGPT was learning from the quiz, given that it was getting the same wrong answers in many cases. “Our hypothesis is that he will never be able to fully understand many of the things we ask him to do.”
We have reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
Carter said ChatGPT could work better in more cultures with better data acquisition and more inclusive data collection. A more direct approach is to monitor AI model drift and make improvements using tools that focus on a cultural perspective.
While larger companies work to make AI useful for everyone, Black and Brown developers in the space have taken matters into their own hands to ensure the next wave of AI is diverse.
Carter, for example, works with companies to lend a hand them acquire more inclusive data. Created by Erin Reddick ChatBlackGPT (no relation to OpenAI) to provide deeper insight into Black culture and history, and Tamar Huggins raised $1.4 million for her ChatGPT alternative called Spark Plug, which translates classic literary texts into the African American Vernacular (AAVE) dialect.
“Hiring, retaining, making sure people are aligned at the table,” Woods said, wondering what else needs to be done to make AI more inclusive. “I know it sounds cliché, but I think it could start to have an impact.”