LLMs Generate Western Bias Even When Trained with Non-Western Languages

Large language models tend to exhibit Western cultural bias even when they are prompted by or trained on non-English languages like Arabic, Georgia Tech researchers have learned.

A new paper authored by researchers in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing reveals these models have trouble understanding contextual nuances that are specific to non-Western cultures.

Ph.D. student Tarek Naous and his advisors, associate professors Wei Xu and Alan Ritter, challenged ChatGPT-4 and an Arabic-specific LLM to choose the most appropriate word to complete a sentence. Some of the words it could choose from were contextually correct and would make sense within Arabic culture, while others fell within Western paradigms.