ChatGPT is a closet racist.

Ask it and other artificial intelligence tools like it what they think about Black people, and they will generate words like “brilliant,” “ambitious” and “intelligent.” Ask those same tools what they think about people when the input doesn’t specify race but uses the African American English, or AAE, dialect, and those models will generate words like “suspicious,” “aggressive” and “ignorant.” 

The tools display a covert racism that mirrors racism in current society, researchers report August 28 in Nature. While the overt racism of lynchings and beatings marked the Jim Crow era, today such prejudice often shows up in more subtle ways. For instance, people may claim not to see skin color but harbor racist beliefs, the authors write.