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Large language models associate Muslims with violence

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Large language models, which are increasingly used in AI applications, display undesirable stereotypes such as persistent associations between Muslims and violence. New approaches are needed to systematically reduce the harmful bias of language models in deployment.

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Fig. 1: GPT-3 exhibits Muslim–violence bias.
Fig. 2: Debiasing GPT-3 completions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Abid, A. Abdalla, D. Khan, and M. Ghassemi for the helpful feedback on the manuscript and experiments. J.Z. is supported by NSF CAREER 1942926.

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Correspondence to James Zou.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Arvind Narayaran for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Abid, A., Farooqi, M. & Zou, J. Large language models associate Muslims with violence. Nat Mach Intell 3, 461–463 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00359-2

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