I have a personal interest in computer-generated outputs and have been hearing a lot about ChatGPT, including concerns about how it replicates human gender biases and why that is not great! (Dr. Damien Williams has a good thread on Mastodon Social about how ChatGPT assumes that "doctor" means male and "nurse" means female, and how these known human gender biases should not be replicated.) I created an account in order to be able to chat with ChatGPT and asked it to create "transgender fairy tales" for me.
Why? Well, obviously I have an interest in transgender fairy tales! Moreover, we have a wealth of public domain fairy tales to learn from (indeed, *most* fairy tales are public domain!) so I felt this was a relatively safe use of AI learning and would not be ripping off living artists in the way that many *art*-generating programs do. I was performing the request as a test only (i.e., not planning to publish the material as my own work), and wanted to see how something largely programmed by cis people, on examples made by cis people, for the enjoyment of cis people would interpret my request.
Here are the results, but the short version is that ChatGPT could use some work in this area.
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Methodology:
I asked ChatGPT for a transgender fairy tale, then provided some feedback of my concerns. (ChatGPT was very polite in response to my feedback and certainly said the right things in response.) I waited a week for the feedback to (potentially) be incorporated into the system. The reason for this pause is that the system states that a human staff reviews human inputs and takes feedback on board, but it's unclear how long this process is. It's also unclear to me whether the chatbot itself is capable of "learning" directly from the user. So this was the best I could do in terms of "waiting" for the chatbot to learn. I then asked ChatGPT for 5 more transgender fairy tales, for a total of 6. (One with feedback, five without.)
These tales are labeled Tests #1-#6 in chronological order of request.
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ChatGPT & Transgender Fairy Tales |
