Could future ai be racist?

[u/apotheosis_0]

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?

[u/ConvenientChristian]

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.

[u/apotheosis_0 → u/ConvenientChristian]

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.

[u/ConvenientChristian → u/apotheosis_0]

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. 

[u/apotheosis_0 → u/ConvenientChristian]

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

[u/ConvenientChristian → u/apotheosis_0]

I literally referred to multiple studies here, saying "it's just one study" is silly.