How Governments Could Influence AI
Whenever you ask AI a question, what comes back isn't always neutral. In some cases, the information that guides an AI response could be manipulated. As more people look to AI for quick answers, new research from College of Arts and Sciences sociologist Hannah Waight suggests you could get a different response depending on which language you use.
Looking at 37 countries, researchers found that AI models portrayed governments and institutions with stronger media control more favorably if the conversation with AI was in a local language other than English. For example, in Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the local-language response was more favorable than the English one over 75% of the time. However, in Sweden, Finland and Norway, it fell below 50%, or no different from random chance.
The research from Waight and co-author Eddie Yang, assistant professor of political science at Purdue University, isn't evidence that AI companies intend to serve as a tool for government influence. But the study's impact is a reminder about the potential democracy and governance issues that there could be with the increasing presence of AI in our daily lives.
“People often talk about AI as if it learns from the internet in some neutral way,” Waight said. “It doesn’t. It learns from information environments that have already been shaped by institutions and power, and those environments can leave measurable traces in what models say."
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