Stay Curious

SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AND UNLOCK ONE MORE ARTICLE FOR FREE.

Sign Up

VIEW OUR Privacy Policy


Discover Magazine Logo

WANT MORE? KEEP READING FOR AS LOW AS $1.99!

Subscribe

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?

FIND MY SUBSCRIPTION
Advertisement

How to Measure The Personality of Your AI System

Computer scientists have worked out how to measure and change AI personality traits, raising ethical issues over how to use these synthetic personalities.

Credit:cybermagician/Shutterstock

Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news

Sign Up

An individual’s personality can often shine in short texts and emails. The same also seems to be true of Large Language Model AI systems like Bard, ChatGPT and others. Hundreds of millions of people have discovered that in short conversations, these AI systems can come across as authoritative, sometimes as arrogant and occasionally as deranged.

And that raises an interesting question: is it possible to reliably measure the characteristics of these AI personalities and then modify them in a way that promotes certain personality traits over others? In other words, can you control the personality of an AI system?

Now we get an answer thanks to the work of Mustafa Safdari, Aleksandra Faust and Maja Mataric at Google Deepmind and colleagues, who have developed the AI equivalent of a psychometric test to measure personality traits in Large Language Models. They say that certain kinds of Large Language Models, particularly larger ...

Stay Curious

JoinOur List

Sign up for our weekly science updates

View our Privacy Policy

SubscribeTo The Magazine

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

Subscribe
Advertisement

0 Free Articles