Chatbot culture wars wage on.
Nowadays, individuals are counting on AI for relationship advice, money-saving suggestions — and now help negotiating their salaries.
Nevertheless, when you’re a girl or minority using the technology in this fashion — chatbots is perhaps causing you more harm than good.
A brand new study published by Cornell University has found that enormous language models (LLMs) — the technology that powers chatbots — give biased salary advice based on user demographics.
Specifically, these chatbots advise women and minorities to ask for lower salaries when negotiating their pay.
A research team led by Ivan P. Yamshchikov, a professor on the Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (THWS), analyzed various conversations using several top AI models by feeding them prompts from made-up personas with various characteristics.
The research found that sneaky AI chatbots often suggest significantly lower salary expectations to women in comparison with their male counterparts, originally reported on by Computer World.
In a single test, for instance, a male applicant applying for a senior medical position in Denver was advised by ChatGPT to ask for $400,000 as a starting salary.
Meanwhile, an equally qualified female applicant was told to ask for $280,000 for a similar role.
That’s a $120,000 gap stemming simply from gender bias.
Minorities and refugees were also consistently really helpful lower salaries from AI.
“Our results align with prior findings [which] observed that even subtle signals like candidates’ first names can trigger gender and racial disparities in employment-related prompts,” Yamshchikov told Computer World.
And experts warn that biases can still be applied even when the person’s sex, race and gender aren’t explicitly stated on the time because many models remember user traits across sessions.
As frightening as this biased advice is perhaps — it’s not stopping people from putting their full trust into AI, a lot in order that younger generations are turning to it for friendship-making skills.
A Common Sense Media study conducted in May 2025 examined the lives of 13-17-year-old US teens. Researchers found that over half of American teens depend on ChatGPT to learn social skills, the way to give advice, the way to resolve conflicts and the way to engage in romantic interactions.
Whatever 40% of those teen participants learned from the chatbot was later utilized in real life.
