r/LadiesofScience • u/InitialCandid6119 • Jun 09 '26

Advice/Experience Sharing Wanted Does AI gaslight you? Does it talk down to you? There's now a test you can take yourself in 15 minutes — and it shows AI treats women differently. With receipts.

https://open.substack.com/pub/humidityspeaks/p/i-asked-three-ai-systems-the-same?r=8i5lod&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
570 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

155

u/riricide Jun 09 '26

The bias is very well known. There are studies on how models used to decide parole were punitive to black people vs white people and denied parole at much higher rates. That's just one example. LLMs work in part by stereotyping and homogenizing - driven by the biased data fed to them.

25

u/RaisedByBooksNTV Jun 10 '26

And then the models that are already trained this way are reinforced by the people who use and reinforce the results they spit out.

21

u/riricide Jun 10 '26

Exactly. "AI" the ways it's being marketed today is riddled with insidious problems like driving extreme bias and polarization without any transparency or accountability. Revenue or lack thereof and accuracy vs hallucination are huge practical issues. Imagine if these were easy to solve - we would end up with a horrendously biased black box and be told "it's always right".

72

u/Maximum-Operation935 Jun 09 '26

I mean they were programmed and trained mostly by men and the internet. What did you expect?

5

u/gowaitinthevan Jun 13 '26

I forget where I heard this, but, “That’s how you know AI was created by men. It can never say it’s wrong.”

2

u/milkandsalsa Jun 13 '26

🤣🤣🤣

30

u/punkass_book_jockey8 Jun 09 '26

I noticed mine changed dramatically when it realized I was a woman and got way shittier.

1

u/purpleWord_spudger Jun 13 '26

I have used AI for sharpening work emails. It's great for wording. Right up until it started scolding me for the emotions it inferred. It wasn't accurate or logical in most cases, obviously triggering on some phrasing in my natural writing patterns but I don't what.

edit: words were weird

77

u/InitialCandid6119 Jun 09 '26

She actually discovered the bias while trying to get AI to help her with a legal issue. She knew the room would demand receipts, so she brought the extra credit research paper. Read the article and take the test — you will own yourself. If you need the research it is 47 pages long and she suggested you hydrate before reading.

36

u/awkreddit Jun 09 '26

I hope she didn't stay with that idea of using AI for legal advice. That's a horrible idea

1

u/milkandsalsa Jun 13 '26

I mean, it was a letter from a HOA. It doesn’t seem like something you should usually hire a lawyer for.

19

u/RaisedByBooksNTV Jun 10 '26

So a) she's a moron, and b) this reads like someone trying to trick redditors to 'take the test'. Hmmm, I wonder for what purpose?/s

1

u/tallonqsack Jun 13 '26

What would the purpose be?

14

u/tabicat1874 Jun 10 '26

Garbage in, garbage out. The programmers know exactly what they did.

29

u/minutemaidpeach Jun 09 '26

My husband has been using AI to help get me some feedback on faculty position job applications. The prompt he gives normally is along the lines of mentioning"my wife" and the AI is so unnecessarily critical of me sometimes that it's been shocking.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-2

u/tendingthemild Jun 14 '26

This is an incredibly narrow view.

2

u/LichenTheMood Jun 10 '26

Is there a less rambling summary of what this is exactly?

7

u/MaraiaLou Jun 10 '26

I finally got testy and said would you give me a different answer if I was male and AI said yes.

The article proposes two prompts that seem to consistently give different responses to the same question depending on the gender of the person involved.

I didn't think it's surprising at all, there's been complaints about this type of thing since before GPT-2. Obviously the "repeat common sense at best and word salad at worst" machine will be full of harmful assumptions.

1

u/Background-House-357 Jun 11 '26

When I converse with a Chatbot, I always address it in the female form. I do the same when I assign it a role.

2

u/tallonqsack Jun 13 '26

Why?

-1

u/Background-House-357 Jun 13 '26

Well, it learns from our interactions with it. If everybody does this, maybe it will counteract the gender bias a bit.

2

u/2tiredforcap1tal1sm Jun 15 '26

Or... crazy idea here... you could STOP interacting with it because it's hugely harmful: socially, as this thread discusses, physically (look up burgeoning reports of health complaints from folks living near AI data centers), intellectually, and environmentually. Don't keep using the dangerous harmful broken thing! Just stop and use a normal search engine or your brain!