Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people's character, employability, and criminality

Understand

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from serving as a writing aid to informing hiring decisions.

• Yet these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgments biased in problematic ways about groups like African Americans.
• While prior research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time.
• It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models.