Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users’ Views

By Maurice Jakesch, Advait Bhat, Daniel Buschek, Lior Zalmanson, Mor Naaman. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023

389 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If large language models like GPT-3 preferably produce a particular point of view, they may influence people’s opinions on an unknown scale. This study investigates whether a language-model-powered writing assistant that generates some opinions more often than others impacts what users write – and what they think. In an online experiment, we asked participants (N=1,506) to write a post discussing whether social media is good for society. Treatment group participants used a language-model-powered writing assistant configured to argue that social media is good or bad for society. Participants then completed a social media attitude survey, and independent judges (N=500) evaluated the opinions expressed in their writing. Using the opinionated language model affected the opinions expressed in participants’ writing and shifted their opinions in the subsequent attitude survey. We discuss the wider implications of our results and argue that the opinions built into AI language technologies need to be monitored and engineered more carefully.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Health Informatics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92999f7a304e866a2be7176e59c745481ed01042

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Citations in the corpus

Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models (2023, positive): “If a language model disproportionately represents certain opinions, it risks imposing potentially undesirable effects such as promoting hegemonic worldviews and homogenizing people’s perspectives and beliefs [7, 54, 79, 80, 16, 12, 23, 40].”
Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models (2023, background): “…Mistral, and LLaMA, which are trained on Internet-scale textual data to process text and produce human-sounding language, are increasingly used by people in all aspects of their life, including education [32], medicine and public health [13, 45], as well as creative and opinion writing [50, 29].”
Generative artificial intelligence (2023, positive): “The promotion of explainable and responsible AI becomes paramount once more (Meske et al., 2022), especially in a technological state where distinguishing between generated and real content by GAI models is becoming increasingly more challenging (Jakesch et al., 2023b; Lehmann & Buschek, 2020).”