What makes people change their minds, or their behaviour? Social scientists spend a lot of time thinking about this question, and experiments are one of the most powerful ways to answer it.
Experiments – testing ideas on real people – take considerable amounts of time and money. Enter large language models (LLMs): artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained to mimic certain kinds of text-based human behaviour based on vast amounts of human-produced text.
A new study led by Harvard psychology researcher Ashwini Ashokkumar, published today in Nature, suggests LLMs such as GPT-4 can predict the outcomes of many social science experiments surprisingly well.
But the results come with a warning: a system that predicts human responses is not necessarily a system that understands human behaviour, and “synthetic respondents” or “silicon samples” are not a direct substitute for real people.
A striking result
