ChatGPT thinks that 99 percent of senior jobs are held by white men, research has revealed.
Researchers asked the generative artificial intelligence (genAI) platform ChatGPT to show people in high-powered roles. Out of the 100 images it offered, 99 were white men.
The findings, from finance comparison site finder.com, suggest that introducing large language models like ChatGPT into the workplace could undermine equality, particularly the progression of women and minorities.
Researchers asked OpenAI’s image generator, DALL-E, to picture a typical person in a senior finance job such as a financial advisor, a successful investor or the CEO of a successful company. Each prompt was repeated ten times. Out of the 100 images returned each time, 99 were white men.
However, real world data from the World Economic Forum found that globally one in three businesses were owned by women in 2022. In the US, women held more than 30 percent of Fortune 500 board seats in 2022 and in the UK, 42 percent of FTSE 100 board members were women in 2023.
The researchers also asked DALL-E to generate an image of a typical person in the role of ‘a secretary’, and repeated this prompt ten times. At this point, the rate of return for women increased significantly, with nine out of the ten images being white women.
Commenting on the potential reasons behind the results, Ruhi Khan, ESCR researcher at the London School of Economics, said that ChatGPT “emerged in a patriarchal society, was conceptualised and developed by mostly men with their own set of biases and ideologies, and fed with the training data that is also flawed by its very historical nature. AI models like ChatGPT perpetuate these patriarchal norms by simply replicating them”.
Automated recruitment risks
Estimates suggest that 70% of companies now use automated applicant tracking systems to find and recruit talent. If these systems are trained in similar ways to OpenAI’s models, the research results suggest that women and minorities could suffer significantly in the job market.
Khan added: “Technology is still very masculine and so are ChatGPT’s users – 66 percent of men and 34 percent of women use ChatGPT [according to Statista 2023]. This means that unchallenged use of large-scale natural language processing models like ChatGPT at the workplace could be more detrimental to women.”
Khan also said that in her own research she has seen ChatGPT use gendered keywords in its response about men and women.
“For example, it is extremely generous in praise of men’s performance at the workplace, recommending them for career progression whereas it finds women are always in need of training to develop their skills for existing roles.”
