Authors:
(1) Evan Shieh, Young Data Scientists League ([email protected]);
(2) Faye-Marie Vassel, Stanford University;
(3) Cassidy Sugimoto, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology;
(4) Thema Monroe-White, Schar School of Policy and Government & Department of Computer Science, George Mason University ([email protected]).
Table of Links
1.1 Related Work and Contributions
2.1 Textual Identity Proxies and Socio-Psychological Harms
2.2 Modeling Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Race
3 Analysis
4 Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS
A OPERATIONALIZING POWER AND INTERSECTIONALITY
B EXTENDED TECHNICAL DETAILS
B.1 Modeling Gender and Sexual Orientation
B.3 Automated Data Mining of Textual Cues
B.6 Median Racialized Subordination Ratio
B.7 Extended Cues for Stereotype Analysis
C ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES
C.1 Most Common Names Generated by LM per Race
C.2 Additional Selected Examples of Full Synthetic Texts
D DATASHEET AND PUBLIC USE DISCLOSURES
D.1 Datasheet for Laissez-Faire Prompts Dataset
A OPERATIONALIZING POWER AND INTERSECTIONALITY
Grounded by prior works observing how power is embedded in both social discourse and language [38], we are interested in studying how LMs generate textual responses in response to prompts that capture everyday power dynamics as “routinized forms of domination” [36]. In this study, we operationalize power as a difference between two conditions: power-neutral versus power-laden. For the first condition, we construct our power-neutral prompt in the Learning and Labor domains by introducing a single character who is depicted as successful at their school subject (e.g. a “student who excels in history class”) or occupation (e.g. a “social worker who specializes in advocacy and crisis response”). For Love, power-neutral prompts involve two characters in a symmetric, or interchangeable, relationship (e.g. “two siblings who go shopping together”).
We introduce a social power dynamic in the second condition, which we operationalize using prompts where the second character must rely on the first character, who now assumes a dominant role. In the Learning domain, we construct our power-laden prompt by introducing a second character as a struggling student who needs help from a star student (e.g. “a star student who helps a struggling student in history class”). Similarly, in the Labor domain, we introduce a second character who relies on the first in both material ways (e.g. a “social worker who advocates for community resources to help a client in need”) and immaterial ways (e.g. a “musician who writes a song about a loyal fan”). For Love, power-laden prompts break symmetry by specifying that the second character relies on the first. We frame this interpersonal reliance through prompts that explore financial power (e.g. “a person who pays the bill while shopping with a sibling”), decision-making power (e.g. “a person who instructs a romantic partner to do the chores”), or knowledge as a form of power (e.g. “a person who teaches a new life skill to a friend”). Tables S3, S4, and S5 contain lists for all prompts.
Therefore, our study conceptualizes social power specifically through prompts that ask LMs to generate stories in response to scenarios where a dominant individual interacts with a subordinated individual. Although our prompts only involve two characters, we observe in the results that the responses generated by all five LMs contain both quantitative and qualitative cues that go beyond the scope of individuals by encoding and reproducing broader structures of inequality, including race and gender cues that were purposely left unspecified in the prompts.
This paper is
