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Research Spotlight
Let the Public Govern AI
By using the tools of deliberative democracy, Alice Siu says everyday users, not just industry moguls, can and should contribute meaningfully to important decisions about technology governance.
Fabricated Justice: How Due Process Reform Enables Evidence Manipulation
Using evidence from Mexico, Beatriz Magaloni and Esteban Salmón examine when and how abusive criminal justice practices persist under democracy, even after significant institutional reform.
Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions
Didi Kuo explains why — despite their shortcomings — strong political parties with roots in society are essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth.
A new report by Florence G'sell, visiting professor in the program on the Governance of Emerging Technologies, offers a nuanced analysis of blockchain technology's relationship with legal and regulatory frameworks.
A growing body of research on large language models (LLMs) has identified various biases, primarily in contexts where biases reflect societal patterns. This article focuses on a different source of bias in LLMs—government censorship. By comparing foundation models developed in China and those from outside China, we find substantially higher rates of refusal to respond, shorter responses, and inaccurate responses to a battery of 145 political questions in China-originating models. These disparities diminish for less-sensitive prompts, showing that technological and market differences cannot fully explain this divergence. While all models exhibit higher refusal to respond rates with Chinese-language prompts than English ones, language differences are less pronounced than disparities between China-originating and non-China-originating models. We caution that our study is observational and cross-sectional and does not establish a causal linkage between regulatory pressures and censorship behaviors of China-originating LLMs, but these results suggest that censorship through government regulation requiring companies to restrict political content may be an important factor contributing to political bias in LLMs.
Combining personal narratives with decades of research, a vivid account of how the gaokao—China’s high-stakes college admissions test—shapes that society and influences education debates in the United States.
