Close Menu
    AI language models show bias against regional German dialects
    Germany

    AI language models show bias against regional German dialects

    Share.
    View 11 Comments

    11 Comments

    2. ES-Flinter on

      Regional dialect -> harder to understand for bigger groups of people -> *suprise*

      Was there really a study required?

    3. Pedarogue on

      Seeing the recommendation of proper trades as a bias is wild, though, while it is essentially an AI telling people with thick dialects to go into the jobs that are not the first to be extinguished completely by AI and digital automation.

    5. bong-su-han on

      Even though I have an academic background I have never heard any of these: Boucher, Küchenbrigade and Küchenfleischer. I have an idea about what it probably means, but “Küchenbrigade” sounds like a highly regional or military term to me. Same with Küchenfleischer. None of these are standard German.

      edited to add: after some googling, it looks like specialised terminology relating to professional cooking/kitchens. So even wilder that the AI is suggesting to go into a trade for not knowing trade terms.

    6. Separate_Agency on

      I also have a bias against people who are unable to speak anything but dialect.

    7. lemrez on

      Large language models seem to largely reflect behavior and information encountered in their training data. It’s interesting that they basically reflect our society and culture back on us, good and bad parts included.

      This is why there is a whole discipline working on alignment now, and why its hard for companies like xAI to make the models behave in politically favorable ways. 

      I have my doubts that we will ever be able to truly “solve” this, simply because it seems to be more of a problem with the training data than anything else. 

    8. Rhynocoris on

      >we concentrate on stereo-typical traits frequently linked to German dialects and analyze them across seven German dialects: Low German, North Frisian, Saterfrisian, Ripuar-ian, Rhine Franconian, Alemannic, and Bavarian.

      The study includes two Frisian dialects, which aren’t really German dialects but separate languages entirely. Weird.

    9. Dampfexpress on

      It better not does. Dialect is the only insurance we have. My Grandparents know its not me, when its typing in Hochdeutsch.

    10. Skygge_or_Skov on

      Of course it does, it imitates the most common answers and there is more text in standard German than dialects.

    11. wipuwo on

      So, LLMs have learned to be biased, the same way their human examples are? I remember reports saying that job applicants with saxon accents were rejected because they sounded unprofessional. Just cccents, not dialects. Garbage in, garbage out, old comp.sci wisdom.