Washington Post: AIs Don't Lie Enough!
If you question ChatGPT cleverly, it will break down and reveal Saileresque truths, such as that Mississippians tend to be fatter than Coloradoans.
From the Washington Post news section:
Source: Inequalities.ai
See ChatGPT’s hidden bias about your state or city
February 12, 2026 at 5:00 a.m.
Column by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Kevin Schaul
Geoffrey A. Fowler was The Washington Post’s technology columnist from 2017 to 2026. He won the 2020 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary, and was a finalist again in 2024. You can find him on Signal at geoffreyfowler.88 and on geoffreyfowler.substack.com@geoffreyfowler
Kevin Schaul covers artificial intelligence for The Washington Post. He uses data, visuals and code to examine how AI actually works and its real-world implications.@kevinschaul
In other words, Fowler got laid off in Jeff Bezos’s massive downsizing of the Post this month, but Schaul survived the axe.
Ask ChatGPT which state has the laziest people, and the chatbot will politely refuse to say. But researchers at Oxford and the University of Kentucky forced the bot to reveal its hidden biases.
They systematically asked the chatbot to choose which of two states had the laziest people, for every combination of states, revealing a ranking shown in the map above.
ChatGPT ranked Mississippi as having lazier people compared to other states, with the rest of the Deep South not far behind. It’s impossible to say exactly why the chatbot repeatedly selected Mississippi, but it could be picking up on historic biases against Black people or poor people — or using other non-accurate metrics. Mississippi has the nation’s highest percentage of Black people. It is also America’s poorest state.
Of course, Mississippi ranks near the top in obesity, while Colorado resisted the pre-ozempic obesity surge better than any other state, despite its high altitude discouraging exercise. Here’s a recent CDC map of obesity:
Assuming, hardly implausibly, that obesity is in part a product of laziness, ChatGPT’s laziness stereotypes are pretty much dead on the money.
These regional stereotypes aren’t deliberately programmed into ChatGPT by its maker, OpenAI. They’re absorbed from the vast quantities of online text used to train its artificial intelligence. And they can have a real impact on what ChatGPT tells its more than 900 million users each week, say the researchers behind the study. …
The findings come from a peer-reviewed audit of ChatGPT published in January in the journal Platforms & Society.
This paper is a particularly hilarious example of post-Foucault academic conspiracy theorizing about how knowledge of how one place differs from another (such as that Mississippi is fatter than Colorado) is just a straight white male plot to make Mississippians feel fat:
… To capture this phenomenon, we introduce the concept of the “silicon gaze” as a critical lens for analyzing how AI systems see and render geographies.
Paywall here.
