The Silicon Gaze: A Typology of Biases and Inequality in LLMs Through the Lens of Place

Abstract:

This paper introduces the concept of the silicon gaze to explain how large language models (LLMs) reproduce and amplify long-standing spatial inequalities. Drawing on a 20.3-million-query audit of ChatGPT, we map systematic biases in the model’s representations of countries, states, cities and neighbourhoods. From these empirics, we argue that bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI, rooted in historically uneven data ecologies and design choices. Building on a power-aware, relational approach, we develop a five-part typology of bias (availability, pattern, averaging, trope and proxy) that accounts for the complex ways in which LLMs privilege certain places while rendering others invisible.

Speaker:

Prof. Matthew Zook

Professor of Digital Geography

Department of Geography 

University of Kentucky

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