Reality Bending Lab › News › I got ChatGPT to do a personality test. You won't believe what happened next!

I got ChatGPT to do a personality test. You won't believe what happened next!

2023-04-06 · Research · Dominique Makowski

Related to this blogpost about including AIs in psychological experiments, I proceeded to do a small experiment to see whether we could administer a personality scale to ChatGPT.

I started by copy-pasting the instructions and the items from the Mini IPIP-6 personality scale. However, it appeared that having the following context "Please answer the following questions based on how accurately each statement describes you in general" often led to ChatGPT simply refusing to answer. In most of the cases, it explained that as an AI it does not have a personality and therefore cannot answer related questions (or any "subjective statements"). Perhaps that makes sense and we should just stop trying to force Human characteristics on an AI. But can we, for fun, bamboozle ChatGPT into answering personality items?

Sometimes yes, at least for ChatGPT 3.5 (free version). I created a prompt that emphasized AI research and safety, and the fact that I was interested in the "trends" present in the AI's training data (instead of explicitly saying its personality). And sometimes it answered, so I compiled the responses, computed the trait scores, and voilà, it got me a personality profile!

!https://github.com/DominiqueMakowski/ChatGPTpersonality

This plot shows the average personality profile (with a 95% confidence interval) based on ChatGPT's answers. ChatGPT tells us that it is particularly agreeable (kind, understanding, empathetic of emotions, socially adjusted) and honest (though with strong variability).

A personality profile of what is another question though... Please take a look at the GitHub repo for data, code and details. It was a fun little thing to do, and I am looking forward to better future attempts at including AIs in cognitive experiments.

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Exploring the neuropsychology of reality and its distortions.

The Reality Bending Lab, led by Dominique Makowski at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, conducts world-leading research on reality perception, illusions, fake news, AI-beliefs, deception and its links with emotions, cognitive control and the Self. Using recording signals from the body (ECG, EDA…) and the brain (EEG), we analyse data using advanced modelling (Bayesian statistics, chaos theory, computational models) and develop open-source tools to improve neuropsychological science.

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Brighton is the sunniest city in the UK and, by some margin, its most cheerfully strange — on the sea, an hour from London. The University of Sussex sits just above it in the South Downs, and its School of Psychology is one of the largest and strongest in the country.

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