AI Psychometrics: Assessing the psychological profiles of large language models through psychometric inventories

Abstract

We illustrate how standard psychometric inventories originally designed for assessing non-cognitive human traits can be repurposed as diagnostic tools to evaluate analogous traits in large language models (LLMs). We start from the assumption that LLMs, inadvertently yet inevitably, acquire psychological traits (metaphorically speaking) from the vast text corpora on which they are trained. Such corpora contain sediments of the personalities, values, beliefs and biases of the countless human authors of these texts, which LLMs learn through a complex training process. The traits that LLMs acquire in such a way can potentially influence their behavior, i.e., their outputs in downstream tasks and applications in which they are employed, which in turn may have real-world consequences for individuals and social groups. By eliciting LLMs’ responses to language-based psychometric inventories we can bring their traits to light. Psychometric profiling enables researchers to study and compare LLMs in terms of non-cognitive characteristics thereby providing a window into the personalities, values, beliefs and biases these models exhibit (or mimic). We discuss the history of similar ideas and outline possible psychometric approaches for LLMs. We demonstrate one promising approach, zero-shot classification, for several LLMs and psychometric inventories. We conclude by highlighting open challenges and future avenues of research for AI Psychometrics.

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