AI chatbots feed our own bias back to us: Study

Artificial Intelligence chatbots are increasingly inclined to echo the views of people who use them, according to US researchers who found that platforms limit what information they share depending on who is asking. Ziang Xiao of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said, "Because people are reading a summary paragraph generated by AI, they think they’re getting unbiased, fact-based answers." But such assumptions are largely wrong, Xiao and colleagues argue after looking at the results of tests involving 272 participants asked to use standard internet searches or AI to help them write about news topics in the US, such as health care and student loans. The "echo chamber" effect is louder when people seek information from a chatbot using large language models than via conventional searches, the team found. So really, people are getting the answers they want to hear," Xiao said, ahead of presenting the team’s findings at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.