Does artificial intelligence bias perceptions of environmental challenges?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how humans obtain information about environmental challenges. Yet the outputs of AI chatbots contain biases that affect how humans view these challenges. Here, we use qualitative and quantitative content analysis to identify bias in AI chatbot characterizations of the issues, causes, consequences, and solutions to environmental challenges. By manually coding an original dataset of 1512 chatbot responses across multiple environmental challenges and chatbots, we identify a number of overlapping areas of bias. Most notably, chatbots are prone to proposing incremental solutions to environmental challenges that draw heavily on past experience and avoid more radical changes to existing economic, social, and political systems. We also find that chatbots are reluctant to assign accountability to investors and avoid associating environmental challenges with broader social justice issues. These findings present new dimensions of bias in AI and auger towards a more critical treatment of AI’s hidden environmental impacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.119 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".