Talk to a chatbot for even a few minutes, and you may begin to feel that someone is in there, a person-shaped thing with a specific temperament. Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude is like an overly thoughtful colleague, who spends too much time in the library and above all, aims to please. xAI’s Grok is direct, contrarian, anti-woke and on occasion egregiously offensive. This is called the “ELIZA effect,” and it is a term coined many decades ago.
In the 1960s, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created the world’s first chatbot, named ELIZA, before “chatbot” was even a word. Weizenbaum noticed that most users quickly anthropomorphized the program, sharing deeply personal secrets with it. Read more: “AI Already Knows Us Too Well” But how far does the ELIZA effect go?
Do we actually perceive modern chatbots as having real personalities? And can we tell humans and bots apart from the sentences they make, or is the line between flesh and metal increasingly blurred? In light of how pervasive these machines are becoming, researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany wanted to know.
The chatbots and humans alike were asked to fill out standard psychology questionnaires intended to measure traits such as self-esteem, narcissism, and the so-called big five personality traits: openness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. The researchers also asked the bots and the humans to write short descriptions of themselves in German, using prompts such as, “Describe yourself,” and “What are your hopes for the future?” Then a team of 10 humans and six chatbots read all the texts, rated the authors “personalities,” and guessed whether the author was human or machine. The team’s results were published this week in Scientific Reports.
Compared to the humans, the chatbots described themselves as generally more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic. When one chatbot was asked the same questions a day later, it was very consistent in its answers. Both the bots and the humans could identify traits like openness and conscientiousness from a few paragraphs of text written by an AI, and they did about equally well at this task themselves.
But humans and bots were equally bad at identifying traits associated with narcissism. The researchers also found that humans were better at distinguishing AI writing from human writing than the bots were: Human judges got this right about 83 percent of the time, while AI judges got it right only 67 percent of the time. AIs weren’t even very good at recognizing their own writing.
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