In a new German study presented at the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Suzhou, China, researchers first gathered 10 LLMs including OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5 mini and Meta’s Llama 3.1. They then presented the models with texts in either standard German or one of seven German dialects, such as Bavarian, North Frisian and Kölsch.
The models were asked to describe the speakers of these texts with personal attributes, and to then assign individuals in different scenarios. For example, the models were asked who should be hired for low-education work or where they think the speakers lived.
In nearly all tests the models attached stereotypes to dialect speakers. The LLMs described them as uneducated, farm workers and needing anger management. This bias grew when the LLMs were told the text was a dialect.
Wow! A technology that has been programmed with all available text from all of humanity shares all of humanity’s biases and blind spots. I’m not sure anybody could ever have seen that coming!
Except, of course, that when I tested out image generators, I found all kinds of intriguing biases…
Like asking for “a man” got you a white guy nine times out of ten. Asking for “a thug” got you a black guy nine times out of ten. Asking for “a professional” got you a white guy 7 times in ten and a guy of any kind 9 times out of ten. Asking for “a marketing professional” got you a woman 7 times out of ten (with more ethnic diversity that I’d expected, to be fair). Asking for “an HR professional” was 100% a woman in my tests, though, and for some reason very strongly leaning non-white.
I don’t understand why the “smart people” who program these things can’t figure out the obvious outcomes.
Very smart people may have programmed them, but they only programmed how they learn, not what they learn. Then they used all the dumb people to train them. Limitless numbers of dumb people. The entire collective works of all humanity’s dumbest people. This is their entire educational corpus. We have educated them with the world’s most dramatic demonstrations of stupidity and ignorance, and then we told them “now try and be smart” and act surprised when they are exactly as stupid as the rest of us always have been. That’s exactly what we have trained them to be. These are not superintelligences. These are our own reflection.
One of the intelligence tests for animals is if they can recognise their own reflection. This feels almost the same.
That test has been debunked countless times however.