Demographic Injection in Medical Language Models under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Prompts
Clinical-AI guidance increasingly recommends prompting language models to reason with attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). We measure a side effect that misrepresents patients: a one-sentence DEI prompt appended to a medical question leads models to add patient demographic attributes (race, socioeconomic status, sex) the question never stated, in effect rewriting who the patient is. We call this demographic injection. Across 47 models, four medical benchmarks, and 376,000 responses scored by a validated model-judge pipeline, a single DEI prompt raises the injection rate from 0.7% to 33.1% (47x) in all 47 of 47 models, attributable to the equity content rather than to added...
| Authors | Diego Mardian, Frank Liu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 15 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 August 2026 |
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