# Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05280 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05280/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Prompt Programming for Large Language Models: Beyond the Few-Shot Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07350/) (2021)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11718/) (2021)
- [Learning How to Ask: Querying LMs with Mixtures of Soft Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06599/) (2021)
- [Toxicity in ChatGPT: Analyzing Persona-assigned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05335/) (2023)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Example Generation with Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06059/) (2018)
- [SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07904/) (2021)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Identifying and Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03035/) (2019)
- [Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04054/) (2021)
- [A New Generation of Perspective API: Efficient Multilingual Character-level Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11176/) (2022)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Noisy Channel Language Model Prompting for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04106/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04892/) (2023)
- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Model Biases in Persona-Steered Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20253/) (2024)
- [Angry Men, Sad Women: Large Language Models Reflect Gendered Stereotypes in Emotion Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03121/) (2024)
- [LLMs are Biased Teachers: Evaluating LLM Bias in Personalized Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14012/) (2024)
- [Exploring Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Personalized Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11107/) (2024)
- ["They are uncultured": Unveiling Covert Harms and Social Threats in LLM Generated Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05378/) (2024)
- [Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11661/) (2024)
- [Helpful assistant or fruitful facilitator? Investigating how personas affect language model behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02099/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Analysis on Large Language Models in Debate Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00050/) (2024)
- [Principled Personas: Defining and Measuring the Intended Effects of Persona Prompting on Task Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19764/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models Through a Global Lens: Are They Culturally Inclusive?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08914/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Impact of Personality Traits on LLM Bias and Toxicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12566/) (2025)
- [Whose Personae? Synthetic Persona Experiments in LLM Research and Pathways to Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00461/) (2025)
- [Persistent Personas? Role-Playing, Instruction Following, and Safety in Extended Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12775/) (2025)
- [Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09637/) (2025)
- [Spotting Out-of-Character Behavior: Atomic-Level Evaluation of Persona Fidelity in Open-Ended Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19352/) (2025)
- [From Single to Societal: Analyzing Persona-Induced Bias in Multi-Agent Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11789/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Implicit Bias in Large Language Models by Attacking From a Psychometric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14023/) (2024)
- [MisinfoEval: Generative AI in the Era of "Alternative Facts"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09949/) (2024)
- [Language Models Predict Empathy Gaps Between Social In-groups and Out-groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01030/) (2025)
- [ERABAL: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Boundary-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14710/) (2024)
- [AI Will Always Love You: Studying Implicit Biases in Romantic AI Companions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20231/) (2025)
- [Vibe Check: Understanding the Effects of LLM-Based Conversational Agents' Personality and Alignment on User Perceptions in Goal-Oriented Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09870/) (2025)
- [EtiCor++: Towards Understanding Etiquettical Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08488/) (2025)
- [User Behavior Prediction as a Generic, Robust, Scalable, and Low-Cost Evaluation Strategy for Estimating Generalization in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05266/) (2025)
- [IndiCASA: A Dataset and Bias Evaluation Framework in LLMs Using Contrastive Embedding Similarity in the Indian Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02742/) (2025)
- [White Men Lead, Black Women Help? Benchmarking and Mitigating Language Agency Social Biases in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10508/) (2024)
- [UPCS: Unbiased Persona Construction for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05257/) (2024)
- [Finding A Voice: Exploring the Potential of African American Dialect and Voice Generation for Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03441/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Large Language Models empower them to follow freeform instructions, including imitating generic or specific demographic personas in conversations. We define generic personas to represent demographic groups, such as "an Asian person", whereas specific personas may take the form of specific popular Asian names like "Yumi". While the adoption of personas enriches user experiences by making dialogue systems more engaging and approachable, it also casts a shadow of potential risk by exacerbating social biases within model responses, thereby causing societal harm through interactions with users. In this paper, we systematically study "persona biases", which we define to be the sensitivity of dialogue models' harmful behaviors contingent upon the personas they adopt. We categorize persona biases into biases in harmful expression and harmful agreement, and establish a comprehensive evaluation framework to measure persona biases in five aspects: Offensiveness, Toxic Continuation, Regard, Stereotype Agreement, and Toxic Agreement. Additionally, we propose to investigate persona biases by experimenting with UNIVERSALPERSONA, a systematically constructed persona dataset encompassing various types of both generic and specific model personas. Through benchmarking on four different models -- including Blender, ChatGPT, Alpaca, and Vicuna -- our study uncovers significant persona biases in dialogue systems. Our findings also underscore the pressing need to revisit the use of personas in dialogue agents to ensure safe application.