I'm Just A Large Language Model, Please Excuse Me For Being Racist: Racial Inequalities Manifested In Generative Artificial Intelligence - Dhiraj Murthy
| Dates: | 11 December 2025 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Professor Dhiraj Murthy staff page |
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In this CoDE lunchtime seminar, Professor Dhiraj Murthy (University of Texas in Austin) shares his research.
SUMMARY
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini are being used throughout the world to generate text, images, music, video, and much more. Though GenAI systems have become advanced, they reproduce racist biases and inequalities overtly and subtly. Specifically, GenAI reproduces existing social inequalities – racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. GenAI is trained from billions of human-produced data points which reflect structural inequalities. Training data contain inherent biases and lack diversity. GenAI models are ultimately Big Tech products and are overtrained with biased Global North-produced Internet and social media content. Early iterations of GenAI like Microsoft’s Tay had to be taken offline due to hugely racist (and other) outbursts. Musk’s GenAI Grok made the news earlier this year with antisemitic content calling for a new holocaust. Because GenAI training processes are black boxed, measuring the bias is difficult. Following the methods of small empirical experiments employed by Safiya Noble to explore racism and racist content in search engines, this talk introduces my own experiments using ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Meta AI regarding race-related prompts both in text and image creation. By examining these outputs, I render visible some of the deeply embedded biases in contemporary generative large language models (LLMs) and discuss how these types of small-scale, empirical experiments can be used to audit GenAI. Ultimately, this study demonstrates some ways in which scholars of race and media can extend and develop theory regarding rapidly changing AI systems.
This seminar will not be recorded.
HOW TO JOIN US
You can attend this seminar in person at the University of Manchester or online via Teams. If there are any changes to this event we will share them on this page, so please check back here before you travel.
Meeting ID: 316 512 406 210 66
Passcode: ay7uS66Z
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/31651240621066?p=S48p0bOxN8Q758RHSX
FINDING US AND ACCESSIBILITY
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Speaker
Professor Dhiraj Murthy staff page
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Alistair Ulph Boardroom (2nd Floor)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
