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2.2: Discrimination by Default

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    207221
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    These biases and harmful outputs don’t just happen on occasion. It seems that Large Language Models like OpenAI’s GPT are almost unavoidably biased. The tremendous volume of discriminatory, gendered, racist, and ableist language in the dataset means that models have a tendency to discriminate by default.

    There are some organisations and communities trying to counteract this seemingly inevitable tendency. BLOOM, for example, is a model trained by BigScience through a “crowdsourced” dataset which had ethical guardrails in place from its inception, including avoiding potential biased datasets. This dataset is called ROOTS 1.61 terabytes of text including 46 languages.

    Unfortunately, although BLOOM may be less biased than GPT, the jury is out on whether the bias has been removed entirely. BLOOM is also significantly less powerful than a model like GPT or Google’s LaMDA, and so it is less likely that people will use it as the basis for their own software.


    2.2: Discrimination by Default is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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