15:00 - 16:30
Mon-Main hall - Z3-Poster 1--27
Mon-Poster 1
Room: Main hall - Z3
Testing Theory of Mind in GPT Models and Humans
Mon-Main hall - Z3-Poster 1-2715
Presented by: James Strachan
James Strachan 1, Dalila Albergo 2, 3, Giulia Borghini 2, Oriana Pansardi 1, 2, 4, Eugenio Scaliti 2, 4, Alessandro Rufo 5, Guido Manzi 5, Michael Graziano 6, Cristina Becchio 1, 2
1 University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, 2 Italian Institute of Technology, 3 University of Trento, 4 University of Turin, 5 Alien Technology Transfer Ltd., 6 Princeton University
Interacting with other people involves reasoning about and prediction of others' mental states, or Theory of Mind. This capacity is a distinguishing feature of human cognition but recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT suggest that they may possess some emergent capacity for human-like Theory of Mind. Such claims merit a systematic approach to explore the limits of GPT models' emergent Theory of Mind capacity and compare it against humans. We show that while GPT models show impressive Theory of Mind-like capacity in controlled tests, there are key deviations from human performance that call into question how human-like this capacity is. Specifically, across a battery of Theory of Mind tests, we found that GPT models performed at human levels when recognising indirect requests, false beliefs, and higher-order mental states like misdirection, but were specifically impaired at recognising faux pas. Follow-up studies revealed that this was due to GPT's conservatism in drawing conclusions that humans took to be self-evident. Our results suggest that while GPT may demonstrate the competence for sophisticated mentalistic inference, its lack of embodiment within an action-oriented environment make this capacity qualitatively different from human cognition.
Keywords: theory of mind, artificial intelligence, large language models, ChatGPT, social cognition