Since their inception, it’s been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that are overt, while letting more covert stereotypes grow stronger and better hidden.

Researchers asked five AI models—including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and older models from Facebook and Google—to make judgments about speakers who used African-American English (AAE). The race of the speaker was not mentioned in the instructions.