Posted on Oct 24, 2026 UTC

A study suggests ChatGPT may stereotype you based on where you live, with the artificially-intelligent model classifying some locations as smarter, some as smellier and some as uglier or stupider.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Kentucky asked OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini model over 20 million questions between March and May of last 2025. They got the ChatGPT model to compare two places in order to get “a single, unambiguous consistent answer” about how it classifies certain states, according to researchers.

If you directly ask ChatGPT whether people living in certain states are stupid, the model might decline to answer. But when backed into a corner and forced to choose between pairs, the model started making harder choices, the researchers found.…