Peter S. Park

Peter S. Park, Simon Goldstein, Aidan O'Gara et al. · berkeley

This paper argues that a range of current AI systems have learned how to deceive humans. We define deception as the systematic inducement of false beliefs in the pursuit of some outcome other than the truth. We first survey empirical examples of AI deception, discussing both special-use AI systems (including Meta's CICERO) built for specific competitive situations, and general-purpose AI systems (such as large language models). Next, we detail several risks from AI deception, such as fraud, election tampering, and losing control of AI systems. Finally, we outline several potential solutions to the problems posed by AI deception: first, regulatory frameworks should subject AI systems that are capable of deception to robust risk-assessment requirements; second, policymakers should implement bot-or-not laws; and finally, policymakers should prioritize the funding of relevant research, including tools to detect AI deception and to make AI systems less deceptive. Policymakers, researchers, and the broader public should work proactively to prevent AI deception from destabilizing the shared foundations of our society.

Peter S. Park, Philipp Schoenegger, Chongyang Zhu

We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to simulate human participants in social-science studies. To do this, we run replications of 14 studies from the Many Labs 2 replication project with OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model, colloquially known as GPT3.5. Based on our pre-registered analyses, we find that among the eight studies we could analyse, our GPT sample replicated 37.5% of the original results and 37.5% of the Many Labs 2 results. However, we were unable to analyse the remaining six studies due to an unexpected phenomenon we call the "correct answer" effect. Different runs of GPT3.5 answered nuanced questions probing political orientation, economic preference, judgement, and moral philosophy with zero or near-zero variation in responses: with the supposedly "correct answer." In one exploratory follow-up study, we found that a "correct answer" was robust to changing the demographic details that precede the prompt. In another, we found that most but not all "correct answers" were robust to changing the order of answer choices. One of our most striking findings occurred in our replication of the Moral Foundations Theory survey results, where we found GPT3.5 identifying as a political conservative in 99.6% of the cases, and as a liberal in 99.3% of the cases in the reverse-order condition. However, both self-reported 'GPT conservatives' and 'GPT liberals' showed right-leaning moral foundations. Our results cast doubts on the validity of using LLMs as a general replacement for human participants in the social sciences. Our results also raise concerns that a hypothetical AI-led future may be subject to a diminished diversity-of-thought.

Philipp Schoenegger, Peter S. Park

Accurately predicting the future would be an important milestone in the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, research on the ability of large language models to provide probabilistic predictions about future events remains nascent. To empirically test this ability, we enrolled OpenAI's state-of-the-art large language model, GPT-4, in a three-month forecasting tournament hosted on the Metaculus platform. The tournament, running from July to October 2023, attracted 843 participants and covered diverse topics including Big Tech, U.S. politics, viral outbreaks, and the Ukraine conflict. Focusing on binary forecasts, we show that GPT-4's probabilistic forecasts are significantly less accurate than the median human-crowd forecasts. We find that GPT-4's forecasts did not significantly differ from the no-information forecasting strategy of assigning a 50% probability to every question. We explore a potential explanation, that GPT-4 might be predisposed to predict probabilities close to the midpoint of the scale, but our data do not support this hypothesis. Overall, we find that GPT-4 significantly underperforms in real-world predictive tasks compared to median human-crowd forecasts. A potential explanation for this underperformance is that in real-world forecasting tournaments, the true answers are genuinely unknown at the time of prediction; unlike in other benchmark tasks like professional exams or time series forecasting, where strong performance may at least partly be due to the answers being memorized from the training data. This makes real-world forecasting tournaments an ideal environment for testing the generalized reasoning and prediction capabilities of artificial intelligence going forward.

Peter S. Park, Max Tegmark

AI companies are attempting to create AI systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. Current AI models are already automating away the livelihoods of some artists, actors, and writers. But there is infighting between those who prioritize current harms and future harms. We construct a game-theoretic model of conflict to study the causes and consequences of this disunity. Our model also helps explain why throughout history, stakeholders sharing a common threat have found it advantageous to unite against it, and why the common threat has in turn found it advantageous to divide and conquer. Under realistic parameter assumptions, our model makes several predictions that find preliminary corroboration in the historical-empirical record. First, current victims of AI-driven disempowerment need the future victims to realize that their interests are also under serious and imminent threat, so that future victims are incentivized to support current victims in solidarity. Second, the movement against AI-driven disempowerment can become more united, and thereby more likely to prevail, if members believe that their efforts will be successful as opposed to futile. Finally, the movement can better unite and prevail if its members are less myopic. Myopic members prioritize their future well-being less than their present well-being, and are thus disinclined to solidarily support current victims today at personal cost, even if this is necessary to counter the shared threat of AI-driven disempowerment.

Philipp Schoenegger, Indre Tuminauskaite, Peter S. Park et al.

Human forecasting accuracy in practice relies on the 'wisdom of the crowd' effect, in which predictions about future events are significantly improved by aggregating across a crowd of individual forecasters. Past work on the forecasting ability of large language models (LLMs) suggests that frontier LLMs, as individual forecasters, underperform compared to the gold standard of a human crowd forecasting tournament aggregate. In Study 1, we expand this research by using an LLM ensemble approach consisting of a crowd of twelve LLMs. We compare the aggregated LLM predictions on 31 binary questions to that of a crowd of 925 human forecasters from a three-month forecasting tournament. Our preregistered main analysis shows that the LLM crowd outperforms a simple no-information benchmark and is not statistically different from the human crowd. In exploratory analyses, we find that these two approaches are equivalent with respect to medium-effect-size equivalence bounds. We also observe an acquiescence effect, with mean model predictions being significantly above 50%, despite an almost even split of positive and negative resolutions. Moreover, in Study 2, we test whether LLM predictions (of GPT-4 and Claude 2) can be improved by drawing on human cognitive output. We find that both models' forecasting accuracy benefits from exposure to the median human prediction as information, improving accuracy by between 17% and 28%: though this leads to less accurate predictions than simply averaging human and machine forecasts. Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments: via the simple, practically applicable method of forecast aggregation. This replicates the 'wisdom of the crowd' effect for LLMs, and opens up their use for a variety of applications throughout society.

Philipp Schoenegger, Peter S. Park, Ezra Karger et al.

Large language models (LLMs) match and sometimes exceeding human performance in many domains. This study explores the potential of LLMs to augment human judgement in a forecasting task. We evaluate the effect on human forecasters of two LLM assistants: one designed to provide high-quality ("superforecasting") advice, and the other designed to be overconfident and base-rate neglecting, thus providing noisy forecasting advice. We compare participants using these assistants to a control group that received a less advanced model that did not provide numerical predictions or engaged in explicit discussion of predictions. Participants (N = 991) answered a set of six forecasting questions and had the option to consult their assigned LLM assistant throughout. Our preregistered analyses show that interacting with each of our frontier LLM assistants significantly enhances prediction accuracy by between 24 percent and 28 percent compared to the control group. Exploratory analyses showed a pronounced outlier effect in one forecasting item, without which we find that the superforecasting assistant increased accuracy by 41 percent, compared with 29 percent for the noisy assistant. We further examine whether LLM forecasting augmentation disproportionately benefits less skilled forecasters, degrades the wisdom-of-the-crowd by reducing prediction diversity, or varies in effectiveness with question difficulty. Our data do not consistently support these hypotheses. Our results suggest that access to a frontier LLM assistant, even a noisy one, can be a helpful decision aid in cognitively demanding tasks compared to a less powerful model that does not provide specific forecasting advice. However, the effects of outliers suggest that further research into the robustness of this pattern is needed.

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.