Measuring Spiritual Values and Bias of Large Language Models

Songyuan Liu, Ziyang Zhang, Runze Yan, Wei Wu, Carl Yang, Jiaying Lu

Keywords: LLM, Bias Mitigation, Religion

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become integral tool for users from various backgrounds. Pre-trained on vast corpora, LLMs reflect the linguistic and cultural nuances embedded in their training data. However, the values and perspectives inherent in this data can influence the behavior of LLMs, leading to potential biases. As a result, the use of LLMs in contexts involving spiritual or moral values necessitates careful consideration of these underlying biases. Our work starts with by testing the spiritual values of popular LLMs. Experimental results show that LLMs' spiritual values are quite diverse, as opposed to the stereotype of atheists or secularists. We then investigate how different spiritual values affect LLMs in social-fairness scenarios (e.g., hate speech identification). Our findings reveal that different spiritual values indeed lead to varied sensitivity to different hate target groups. Furthermore, we propose to continue pre-training LLMs on spiritual texts, and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in mitigating spiritual biases.

Submission Number: 11