AI predicting human motivation and behaviors by watching people play games (Credit: Midjourney)
A new USC study examined whether large language models (LLMs) could reason about human behavior in strategic social situations, using simple social games to test how well the models could predict players’ actions and motives.
Led by USC robotics pioneer engineer Maja Matarić and her PhD student Kaleen Shrestha, the study evaluates whether today’s AI models can recognize underlying human motives, learn from behavior over time and apply that knowledge to new situations.
The study tests AI’s capabilities by having the models observe people playing different social games and predict players’ next moves based on their previous actions, while also attempting to identify each player’s motives.
The research team also compares AI predictions with human predictions, making it the first study to evaluate AI reasoning skills over time and compare these “temporal” results with human performance in a game context to date.
