2024/08/21 by Simon Münker, Münker, Simon · 3 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.11415
openalex publication_date 2024/08/21 · openalex created_date 2024/12/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Contemporary research in social sciences increasingly utilizes state-of-the-art generative language models to annotate or generate content. While these models achieve benchmark-leading performance on common language tasks, their application to novel out-of-domain tasks remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we investigate how personalized language models align with human responses on the Moral Foundation Theory Questionnaire. We adapt open-source generative language models to different political personas and repeatedly survey these models to generate synthetic data sets where model-persona combinations define our sub-populations. Our analysis reveals that models produce inconsistent results across multiple repetitions, yielding high response variance. Furthermore, the alignment between synthetic data and corresponding human data from psychological studies shows a weak correlation, with conservative persona-prompted models particularly failing to align with actual conservative populations. These results suggest that language models struggle to coherently represent ideologies through in-context prompting due to their alignment process. Thus, using language models to simulate social interactions requires measurable improvements in in-context optimization or parameter manipulation to align with psychological and sociological stereotypes properly.