A Perspectival Mirror of the Elephant: Investigating Language Bias on Google, ChatGPT, Wikipedia, and YouTube

Contrary to Google Search's mission of delivering information from "many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world," we find that Google and its most prominent returned results - Wikipedia and YouTube - simply reflect a narrow set of cultural stereotypes tied to the search language for complex topics like "Buddhism," "Liberalism," "colonization," "Iran" and "America." Simply stated, they present, to varying degrees, distinct information across the same search in different languages, a phenomenon we call 'language bias.' This paper presents evidence and analysis of language bias and discusses its larger social implications. Instead of presenting a global picture of a complex topic, our online searches and emerging tools like ChatGPT turn us into the proverbial blind person touching a small portion of an elephant, ignorant of the existence of other cultural perspectives. Piecing together a genuine depiction of the elephant is a challenging and important endeavor that will require collaborative efforts from scholars in both the humanities and technology.