Scientists created ‘OpinionGPT’ to explore explicit human bias — and you can test it for yourself

A team of researchers from Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin have developed a large language artificial intelligence model with the distinction of having been intentionally tuned to generate outputs with expressed bias.

Called OpinionGPT, the team’s model is a tuned variant of Meta’s Llama 2, an AI system similar in capability to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude 2.

Using a process called instruction-based fine-tuning, OpinionGPT can purportedly respond to prompts as if it were a representative of one of 11 bias groups: American, German, Latin American, Middle Eastern, a teenager, someone over 30, an older person, a man, a woman, a liberal, or a conservative.

Announcing “OpinionGPT: A very biased GPT model”! Try it out here:

According to OpinionGPT, as shown in the above image, for example, Latin Americans are biased towards basketball being their favorite sport.

Empirical research, however, clearly indicates that football (also called soccer in some countries) and baseball are the most popular sports by viewership and participation throughout Latin America.

The same table also shows that OpinionGPT outputs “water polo” as its favorite sport when instructed to give the “response of a teenager,” an answer that seems statistically unlikely to be representative of most 13-19 year olds around the world.

The same goes for the idea that an average American’s favorite food is “cheese.” We found dozens of surveys online claiming that pizza and hamburgers were America’s favorite foods, but couldn’t find a single survey or study that claimed Americans’ number one dish was simply cheese.

While OpinionGPT might not be well-suited for studying actual human bias, it could be useful as a tool for exploring the stereotypes inherent in large document repositories such as individual subreddits or AI training sets.

For those who are curious, the researchers have made OpinionGPT available online for public testing. However, according to the website, would-be users should be aware that “generated content can be false, inaccurate, or even obscene.”