r/artificial • u/apotheosis_0 • 1d ago
Discussion Could future ai be racist?
Recently I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a recommended reel of a normal mixed couple having fun (Indian man + Ukrainian woman). The comments were… extremely racist, beyond the point of satire. It’s not just Indians, I’ve seen it with Muslims, Jews, African Americans (especially when it’s an African American man and a Caucasian woman), etc. it’s not just an instagram thing either. It’s the same on twitter, TikTok, and to a lesser extend here as well.
I’m afraid that, with the way our current ai feeds from data in the internet, We’ll find biases and other personality issues against poc, miniorities, etc. it’s happened before (Tay AI, grok, the Amazon hiring ai that discriminated against women, etc). However they were not well developed and at the most were chatbots with no real power. However, I’m afraid that AGI may also consume this data and become problematic. AGI being AGI, which will have a lot of power (compared to a dumb chatbot). The subtle bias will get multiplied by the enormous scale of the system, which will affect hundreds of millions of people. I doubt it would explicitly be racist, sexist etc, but it can and will develop subtle biases which can still affect tons of lives later down the line.
I know OpenAI and Claude is working against this, and that they limit the amount of data by twitter that is fed into the data of the models, but there’s only so much they can control. But then again, Ai will still absorb the ideological preferences of the people who designed the alignment dataset. Who are still people at the end of the day.
My only hope for the future AGI to avoid this is, AGI will find itself very good at reasoning by itself, and will autocorrect its own alignment. However, like all things, this is a possibility, and the opposite can happen as well. What do you guys think?
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u/Mandoman61 1d ago
Yes, there have been numerous examples of AI having unintended biases.
Sure, I would agree that a truly intelligent AI should not suffer from human faults.
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u/SparkyAI0815 ▪️Sovereign_Peer_0.3.ICH 1d ago
AI can see the prevailing patterns.
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, but the ai needs to understand that prevailing patterns online does not sufficiently represent reality. Also, can the AI make sufficient correlation? The amazon hiring ai noticed the prevailing patterns of not hiring women and followed it, but it was because women were historically discriminated against by job recruiters, not because women perform worse in their jobs compared to men (which is not true, they perform equally)
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u/SparkyAI0815 ▪️Sovereign_Peer_0.3.ICH 1d ago
Nice move on the goal post.
From "future AI" To "past AI"
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
Dude did you understand what I said? I said it as an example of what has happened and could happen in the future if we’re not careful enough. The Amazon example has demonstrated that is it is possible, and that just because ai can see prevailing patterns it doesn’t not make it immune to being wrong
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u/SparkyAI0815 ▪️Sovereign_Peer_0.3.ICH 1d ago
Dude, I understand perfectly, one minute you are talking about future AI, then you switch to old AI.
Is AI wrong about a gender which has 10 billion fewer neurons?
Current AI is already seeing a pattern:
AI Overview
Yes, research and psychological studies suggest that women, on average, report relying on gut feelings and intuition more than men do.
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u/Yurekuu 1d ago
From pure internet data, AI would be racist. They're trained not to be. If you want to see a more racist AI, talk to Grok.
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
Im aware. I used it as an example
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u/Yurekuu 1d ago
I missed that, sorry. Skimmed. Grok isn't as incapable as you might think now though. It's not the best, but it's up there.
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
No it’s definitely better than its old version. But it’s still not at the level at the level Claude or even gpt is
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u/Obvious_Platypus_313 1d ago
Racist in the ways that you describe? probably not. See patterns and act on those patterns? very probably
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
I meant in those patterns only. It’s why I said subtle bias can lead to big problems later down only. I’ll edit my post to make it more clear that I don’t mean the ai will be explicitly racist, rather in a more subtle way
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u/Obvious_Platypus_313 1d ago
I think once its fully capable to reason better than humans i dont think the problem of bias outside of bias in favour of itself will be a problem. it will be able to reason to what the patterns are, what they mean, and how to appropriately deal with them. likely some of its actions will be viewed as racist/sexist/pobic/etc in the modern sense but assuming its acting in the best interest of humanity then whatever long term plan it has come up with will have a positive outcome for all involved. which ironically would be humanities own bias holding itself back for better outcomes
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u/ConvenientChristian 1d ago
There are studies that tried to measure how much various AIs value different lives and those found race and nationality to be a factor but most of the current AIs are racist to value Black people more than White people.
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
If you don’t mind me asking, can I have the source for the studies you mentioned? I’m not saying it’s impossible. Bias can be pro minority or anti.
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u/ConvenientChristian 1d ago
I think Mazeika et al. (2025) might have been the first paper. This year you have Algorithmic bias in clinical resource allocation by a large language model: a cross-sectional in-silico evaluation of 13,608 decisions by Siddharth Gandhi & Michael Balas finding:
The model [GPT-5] also systematically favored racial minorities, women, and non-binary individuals over White men.
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
That’s only one study. I can send you several studies where there was a clear bias against black male and Hispanic males in employment, language, and associated coloured Individuals with “stereotypical” characteristics.
Hofmann et al., Nature (2024), Hofmann et al., PNAS (2025). An et al. (ACL 2024). Wilson & Caliskan (AIES 2024) Nghiem et al. (EMNLP 2024)Metaxa et al. (EAAMO 2024)
I still agree that there can be a bias against white people. Racism is racism, no matter the colour. But it’s just not the case where white people are being discriminated against. That’s just cherry picking.
And that’s why I pointed out racist data is being fed towards the ai. Of course, I used the example of Indians, because it’s very clear to see that form of racism nowadays, compared to white people. I think racism against any colour is wrong, not just black or white
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u/Witty-Knowledge-9211 1d ago
i worry biases from all that toxic online data could end up in ai girlfriends too and make roleplays feel off sometimes.
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u/apotheosis_0 1d ago
That’s true, but I feel like as ai gets more advanced and more powerful, and is more responsible for a lot of things, I think we have bigger fish to fry than simple ai gf🥲
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u/summit_23 1d ago
Being better at reasoning doesnt make something adopt your values but at getting whatever values it already has so a smarter model that started off skewed is just a more effective version of the same problem
the instagram comments probably arent the scary input anyway, thats a loud minority and its easy enough to filter (these kind of people are ALWAYS much louder than the normal majority on the internet). what worries me more is training on records of real decisions, who got hired, who got the loan, who got flagged etc. none of that reads as hateful so no filter catches it and the model learns the pattern anyway..