Digital Skin, Digital Bias: Uncovering Tone-Based Biases in LLMs and Emoji Embeddings

Researchers conducted the first large-scale study comparing bias in skin-toned emoji representations across specialized emoji models and four major LLMs (Llama, Gemma, Qwen, Mistral), finding that while LLMs handle skin tone modifiers well, popular emoji embedding models exhibit severe deficiencies and systemic biases in sentiment and meaning across different skin tones.