Cultural Bias in LLMs
Edit: I recently discovered that this blog post was cited in a research paper from Columbia University! It’s definitely a humbling reminder how just sharing your ideas/work - even when they just feel like personal exploration - can contribute to bigger discussions.
In my recent post on defensive technology, I explored the implications of integrating AI into critical workflows like hiring, medicine, credit scoring, and the judicial system. The core concern is the interpretability and alignment of AI outputs. The lack of transparency in AI aided decision making processes can lead to biases, misalignment, and unsafe applications in general. What it comes down to is that we need to know why AI systems are making the decisions they do.
The topic raises a lot of interesting questions, one of them being cultural bias in LLM outputs. Culture fundamentally shapes people’s reasoning, behavior, and communication, a concept also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It influences causal attributions of behavior (such as explaining others’ actions based on their individual traits versus situational factors 1), human judgment (such as resolving contradictions through compromise versus logical arguments 2), personality 3, technological innovation 4, trust in automation 5, privacy concerns 6, health behaviors and outcomes 7, among loads of other factors. Do, then, the cultural values embedded into LLMs influence their ethical alignment and reasoning processes too?
Besides the integration of these biases into decision making, language plays a key role in the transmission of culture across generations. Now that gen-AI has transformed how language is produced and transmitted, if this content is sourced from models overrepresenting certain parts of the world (such as those with a latent bias favoring Western cultural values) we will over time propagate Western cultural values and reasoning chains more so than others. This is a concern when it comes to influencing global perceptions and behaviors to be more aligned with Western culture. The erosion of cultural diversity in digital communication is a threat to diversity of thought.The rapid adoption of LLMs in countries around the world may in the long term affect people’s authentic expressions.
