Hey GPT, Can You be More Racist? Analysis from Crowdsourced Attempts to Elicit Biased Content from Generative AI

Hangzhi Guo, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Eunchae Jang, Mukund Srinath, Wenbo Zhang, Bonam Mingole, Vipul Gupta, Kush R. Varshney, S. Shyam Sundar, Amulya Yadav

Abstract: The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) tools across diverse applications has amplified the importance of addressing societal biases inherent within these technologies. While the NLP community has extensively studied LLM bias, research investigating how non-expert users perceive and interact with biases from these systems remains limited. As these technologies become increasingly prevalent, understanding this question is crucial to inform model developers in their efforts to mitigate bias. To address this gap, this work presents the findings from a university-level competition, which challenged participants to design prompts for eliciting biased outputs from GenAI tools. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the competition submissions and identify a diverse set of biases in GenAI and strategies employed by participants to induce bias in GenAI. Our finding provides unique insights into how non-expert users perceive and interact with biases from GenAI tools.