Researchers Use Environmental Justice Questions to Reveal Geographic Biases in ChatGPT
- Author: David Fleming
- Full Title: Researchers Use Environmental Justice Questions to Reveal Geographic Biases in ChatGPT
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #geospatial
- URL: https://news.vt.edu/content/news_vt_edu/en/articles/2023/12/cnre-geographic-biases-ai.html
Highlights
- Utilizing a list of the 3,108 counties in the contiguous United States, the research group asked the ChatGPT interface to answer a prompt asking about the environmental justice issues in each county. The researchers selected environmental justice as a topic to expand the range of questions typically used to test the performance of generative AI tools. Asking questions by county allowed the researchers to measure ChatGPT responses against sociodemographic considerations such as population density and median household income. (View Highlight)
- Surveying counties with populations as varied as Los Angeles County, California, with a population of 10,019,635, and Loving County, Texas, with a population of 83, the generative AI tool showed a capacity to identify location-specific environmental justice challenges in large, high-density population areas. However, the tool was limited in its ability to identify and provide contextualized information on local environmental justice issues. (View Highlight)
- • Refine localized and contextually grounded knowledge, so that geographical biases are reduced
• Safeguard large-language models such as ChatGPT against challenging scenarios such as ambiguous user instructions or feedback
• Enhance user awareness and policy so that people are better informed of the strengths and weaknesses, particularly around sensitive topics (View Highlight)