WEIRD In, WEIRD Out

“WEIRD people”: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic.

The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values. For countries like Libya and Pakistan, AI results are little better than a coin toss.

There is a real risk that increasing use of AI tools in international research will flatten out and devalue insights, as highly diverse peoples’ individual spoken and unspoken responses are fed into text-processing machines and emerge looking and sounding vaguely Californian. What looks like a living, breathing forest to us may end up being processed as just so much wood.

ChatGPT responses are slightly more correlated to smaller Western countries such as New Zealand than the US. This likely reflects the USA’s greater cultural diversity, and the fact that ChatGPT was developed in California.