Cameron R. Jones

James A. Michaelov, Catherine Arnett, Tyler A. Chang et al. · mit

How does the extent to which a model is open or closed impact the scientific inferences that can be drawn from research that involves it? In this paper, we analyze how restrictions on information about model construction and deployment threaten reliable inference. We argue that current closed models are generally ill-suited for scientific purposes, with some notable exceptions, and discuss ways in which the issues they present to reliable inference can be resolved or mitigated. We recommend that when models are used in research, potential threats to inference should be systematically identified along with the steps taken to mitigate them, and that specific justifications for model selection should be provided.

Cameron R. Jones, Benjamin K. Bergen

We evaluated GPT-4 in a public online Turing test. The best-performing GPT-4 prompt passed in 49.7% of games, outperforming ELIZA (22%) and GPT-3.5 (20%), but falling short of the baseline set by human participants (66%). Participants' decisions were based mainly on linguistic style (35%) and socioemotional traits (27%), supporting the idea that intelligence, narrowly conceived, is not sufficient to pass the Turing test. Participant knowledge about LLMs and number of games played positively correlated with accuracy in detecting AI, suggesting learning and practice as possible strategies to mitigate deception. Despite known limitations as a test of intelligence, we argue that the Turing test continues to be relevant as an assessment of naturalistic communication and deception. AI models with the ability to masquerade as humans could have widespread societal consequences, and we analyse the effectiveness of different strategies and criteria for judging humanlikeness.

Ishika Rathi, Sydney Taylor, Benjamin K. Bergen et al.

Everyday AI detection requires differentiating between people and AI in informal, online conversations. In many cases, people will not interact directly with AI systems but instead read conversations between AI systems and other people. We measured how well people and large language models can discriminate using two modified versions of the Turing test: inverted and displaced. GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and displaced human adjudicators judged whether an agent was human or AI on the basis of a Turing test transcript. We found that both AI and displaced human judges were less accurate than interactive interrogators, with below chance accuracy overall. Moreover, all three judged the best-performing GPT-4 witness to be human more often than human witnesses. This suggests that both humans and current LLMs struggle to distinguish between the two when they are not actively interrogating the person, underscoring an urgent need for more accurate tools to detect AI in conversations.

Cameron R. Jones, Agnese Lombardi, Kyle Mahowald et al.

Humans align to one another in conversation -- adopting shared conventions that ease communication. We test whether LLMs form the same kinds of conventions in a multimodal communication game. Both humans and LLMs display evidence of convention-formation (increasing the accuracy and consistency of their turns while decreasing their length) when communicating in same-type dyads (humans with humans, AI with AI). However, heterogenous human-AI pairs fail -- suggesting differences in communicative tendencies. In Experiment 2, we ask whether LLMs can be induced to behave more like human conversants, by prompting them to produce superficially humanlike behavior. While the length of their messages matches that of human pairs, accuracy and lexical overlap in human-LLM pairs continues to lag behind that of both human-human and AI-AI pairs. These results suggest that conversational alignment requires more than just the ability to mimic previous interactions, but also shared interpretative biases toward the meanings that are conveyed.

Cameron R. Jones, Benjamin K. Bergen

We evaluated 4 systems (ELIZA, GPT-4o, LLaMa-3.1-405B, and GPT-4.5) in two randomised, controlled, and pre-registered Turing tests on independent populations. Participants had 5 minute conversations simultaneously with another human participant and one of these systems before judging which conversational partner they thought was human. When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time -- not significantly more or less often than the humans they were being compared to -- while baseline models (ELIZA and GPT-4o) achieved win rates significantly below chance (23% and 21% respectively). The results constitute the first empirical evidence that any artificial system passes a standard three-party Turing test. The results have implications for debates about what kind of intelligence is exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs), and the social and economic impacts these systems are likely to have.

Jared Moore, Rasmus Overmark, Ned Cooper et al.

A growing body of work attempts to evaluate the theory of mind (ToM) abilities of humans and large language models (LLMs) using static, non-interactive question-and-answer benchmarks. However, theoretical work in the field suggests that first-personal interaction is a crucial part of ToM and that such predictive, spectatorial tasks may fail to evaluate it. We address this gap with a novel ToM task that requires an agent to persuade a target to choose one of three policy proposals by strategically revealing information. Success depends on a persuader's sensitivity to a given target's knowledge states (what the target knows about the policies) and motivational states (how much the target values different outcomes). We varied whether these states were Revealed to persuaders or Hidden, in which case persuaders had to inquire about or infer them. In Experiment 1, participants persuaded a bot programmed to make only rational inferences. LLMs excelled in the Revealed condition but performed below chance in the Hidden condition, suggesting difficulty with the multi-step planning required to elicit and use mental state information. Humans performed moderately well in both conditions, indicating an ability to engage such planning. In Experiment 2, where a human target role-played the bot, and in Experiment 3, where we measured whether human targets' real beliefs changed, LLMs outperformed human persuaders across all conditions. These results suggest that effective persuasion can occur without explicit ToM reasoning (e.g., through rhetorical strategies) and that LLMs excel at this form of persuasion. Overall, our results caution against attributing human-like ToM to LLMs while highlighting LLMs' potential to influence people's beliefs and behavior.

Cameron R. Jones, Benjamin K. Bergen

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content that is as persuasive as human-written text and appear capable of selectively producing deceptive outputs. These capabilities raise concerns about potential misuse and unintended consequences as these systems become more widely deployed. This review synthesizes recent empirical work examining LLMs' capacity and proclivity for persuasion and deception, analyzes theoretical risks that could arise from these capabilities, and evaluates proposed mitigations. While current persuasive effects are relatively small, various mechanisms could increase their impact, including fine-tuning, multimodality, and social factors. We outline key open questions for future research, including how persuasive AI systems might become, whether truth enjoys an inherent advantage over falsehoods, and how effective different mitigation strategies may be in practice.

Philipp Schoenegger, Francesco Salvi, Jiacheng Liu et al. · oxford

We directly compare the persuasion capabilities of a frontier large language model (LLM; Claude Sonnet 3.5) against incentivized human persuaders in an interactive, real-time conversational quiz setting. In this preregistered, large-scale incentivized experiment, participants (quiz takers) completed an online quiz where persuaders (either humans or LLMs) attempted to persuade quiz takers toward correct or incorrect answers. We find that LLM persuaders achieved significantly higher compliance with their directional persuasion attempts than incentivized human persuaders, demonstrating superior persuasive capabilities in both truthful (toward correct answers) and deceptive (toward incorrect answers) contexts. We also find that LLM persuaders significantly increased quiz takers' accuracy, leading to higher earnings, when steering quiz takers toward correct answers, and significantly decreased their accuracy, leading to lower earnings, when steering them toward incorrect answers. Overall, our findings suggest that AI's persuasion capabilities already exceed those of humans that have real-money bonuses tied to performance. Our findings of increasingly capable AI persuaders thus underscore the urgency of emerging alignment and governance frameworks.

Jared Moore, Ned Cooper, Rasmus Overmark et al.

Recent evidence suggests Large Language Models (LLMs) display Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities. Most ToM experiments place participants in a spectatorial role, wherein they predict and interpret other agents' behavior. However, human ToM also contributes to dynamically planning action and strategically intervening on others' mental states. We present MindGames: a novel `planning theory of mind' (PToM) task which requires agents to infer an interlocutor's beliefs and desires to persuade them to alter their behavior. Unlike previous evaluations, we explicitly evaluate use cases of ToM. We find that humans significantly outperform o1-preview (an LLM) at our PToM task (11% higher; $p=0.006$). We hypothesize this is because humans have an implicit causal model of other agents (e.g., they know, as our task requires, to ask about people's preferences). In contrast, o1-preview outperforms humans in a baseline condition which requires a similar amount of planning but minimal mental state inferences (e.g., o1-preview is better than humans at planning when already given someone's preferences). These results suggest a significant gap between human-like social reasoning and LLM abilities.

Philipp Schoenegger, Cameron R. Jones, Philip E. Tetlock et al.

Large language model performance can be improved in a large number of ways. Many such techniques, like fine-tuning or advanced tool usage, are time-intensive and expensive. Although prompt engineering is significantly cheaper and often works for simpler tasks, it remains unclear whether prompt engineering suffices for more complex domains like forecasting. Here we show that small prompt modifications rarely boost forecasting accuracy beyond a minimal baseline. In our first study, we tested 38 prompts across Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3.5 Haiku, GPT-4o, and Llama 3.1 405B. In our second, we introduced compound prompts and prompts from external sources, also including the reasoning models o1 and o1-mini. Our results show that most prompts lead to negligible gains, although references to base rates yield slight benefits. Surprisingly, some strategies showed strong negative effects on accuracy: especially encouraging the model to engage in Bayesian reasoning. These results suggest that, in the context of complex tasks like forecasting, basic prompt refinements alone offer limited gains, implying that more robust or specialized techniques may be required for substantial performance improvements in AI forecasting.

Zhiqiang Pi, Annapurna Vadaparty, Benjamin K. Bergen et al.

Recent empirical results have sparked a debate about whether or not Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of Theory of Mind (ToM). While some have found LLMs to be successful on ToM evaluations such as the False Belief task, others have shown that their performance is not robust against trivial alterations to stimuli. In this paper, we introduce SCALPEL -- a technique to incrementally modify stimuli to test different specific hypotheses about why LLMs fail -- and apply this method to the "transparent-access" modification of the unexpected contents task. Our results suggest that LLMs often do poorly because they fail to make essential common-sense inferences, such as that seeing a transparent container implies recognizing its contents. We conclude that while modern LLMs go beyond mere pattern matching, they still fall short of robust human-like ToM. We argue that SCALPEL can help cognitive scientists examine LLMs' capabilities in finer detail and provide insight into alternative mechanisms by which tasks that are used to assess human cognition might be completed.

Cameron R. Jones, Benjamin K. Bergen

We evaluated 3 systems (ELIZA, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) in a randomized, controlled, and preregistered Turing test. Human participants had a 5 minute conversation with either a human or an AI, and judged whether or not they thought their interlocutor was human. GPT-4 was judged to be a human 54% of the time, outperforming ELIZA (22%) but lagging behind actual humans (67%). The results provide the first robust empirical demonstration that any artificial system passes an interactive 2-player Turing test. The results have implications for debates around machine intelligence and, more urgently, suggest that deception by current AI systems may go undetected. Analysis of participants' strategies and reasoning suggests that stylistic and socio-emotional factors play a larger role in passing the Turing test than traditional notions of intelligence.