Trying to be human: Linguistic traces of stochastic empathy in language models

Differentiating between generated and human-written content is important for navigating the modern world. Large language models (LLMs) are crucial drivers behind the increased quality of computer-generated content. Reportedly, humans find it increasingly difficult to identify whether an AI model generated a piece of text. Our work tests how two important factors contribute to the human vs AI race: empathy and an incentive to appear human. We address both aspects in two experiments: human participants and a state-of-the-art LLM wrote relationship advice (Study 1, n=530) or mere descriptions (Study 2, n=610), either instructed to be as human as possible or not. New samples of humans (n=428 and n=408) then judged the texts' source. Our findings show that when empathy is required, humans excel. Contrary to expectations, instructions to appear human were only effective for the LLM, so the human advantage diminished. Computational text analysis revealed that LLMs become more human because they may have an implicit representation of what makes a text human and effortlessly apply these heuristics. The model resorts to a conversational, self-referential, informal tone with a simpler vocabulary to mimic stochastic empathy. We discuss these findings in light of recent claims on the on-par performance of LLMs.

Large Language Models in Cryptocurrency Securities Cases: Can ChatGPT Replace Lawyers?

Large Language Models (LLMs) could enhance access to the legal system. However, empirical research on their effectiveness in conducting legal tasks is scant. We study securities cases involving cryptocurrencies as one of numerous contexts where AI could support the legal process, studying LLMs' legal reasoning and drafting capabilities. We examine whether a) an LLM can accurately determine which laws are potentially being violated from a fact pattern, and b) whether there is a difference in juror decision-making based on complaints written by a lawyer compared to an LLM. We feed fact patterns from real-life cases to GPT-3.5 and evaluate its ability to determine correct potential violations from the scenario and exclude spurious violations. Second, we had mock jurors assess complaints written by the LLM and lawyers. GPT-3.5's legal reasoning skills proved weak, though we expect improvement in future models, particularly given the violations it suggested tended to be correct (it merely missed additional, correct violations). GPT-3.5 performed better at legal drafting, and jurors' decisions were not statistically significantly associated with the author of the document upon which they based their decisions. Because LLMs cannot satisfactorily conduct legal reasoning tasks, they would be unable to replace lawyers at this stage. However, their drafting skills (though, perhaps, still inferior to lawyers), could provide access to justice for more individuals by reducing the cost of legal services. Our research is the first to systematically study LLMs' legal drafting and reasoning capabilities in litigation, as well as in securities law and cryptocurrency-related misconduct.

Use of LLMs for Illicit Purposes: Threats, Prevention Measures, and Vulnerabilities

Spurred by the recent rapid increase in the development and distribution of large language models (LLMs) across industry and academia, much recent work has drawn attention to safety- and security-related threats and vulnerabilities of LLMs, including in the context of potentially criminal activities. Specifically, it has been shown that LLMs can be misused for fraud, impersonation, and the generation of malware; while other authors have considered the more general problem of AI alignment. It is important that developers and practitioners alike are aware of security-related problems with such models. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing - predominantly scientific - efforts on identifying and mitigating threats and vulnerabilities arising from LLMs. We present a taxonomy describing the relationship between threats caused by the generative capabilities of LLMs, prevention measures intended to address such threats, and vulnerabilities arising from imperfect prevention measures. With our work, we hope to raise awareness of the limitations of LLMs in light of such security concerns, among both experienced developers and novel users of such technologies.

Susceptibility to Influence of Large Language Models

Two studies tested the hypothesis that a Large Language Model (LLM) can be used to model psychological change following exposure to influential input. The first study tested a generic mode of influence - the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE) - where earlier exposure to a statement (through, for example, rating its interest) boosts a later truthfulness test rating. Data was collected from 1000 human participants using an online experiment, and 1000 simulated participants using engineered prompts and LLM completion. 64 ratings per participant were collected, using all exposure-test combinations of the attributes: truth, interest, sentiment and importance. The results for human participants reconfirmed the ITE, and demonstrated an absence of effect for attributes other than truth, and when the same attribute is used for exposure and test. The same pattern of effects was found for LLM-simulated participants. The second study concerns a specific mode of influence - populist framing of news to increase its persuasion and political mobilization. Data from LLM-simulated participants was collected and compared to previously published data from a 15-country experiment on 7286 human participants. Several effects previously demonstrated from the human study were replicated by the simulated study, including effects that surprised the authors of the human study by contradicting their theoretical expectations (anti-immigrant framing of news decreases its persuasion and mobilization); but some significant relationships found in human data (modulation of the effectiveness of populist framing according to relative deprivation of the participant) were not present in the LLM data. Together the two studies support the view that LLMs have potential to act as models of the effect of influence.

The RW3D: A multi-modal panel dataset to understand the psychological impact of the pandemic

Besides far-reaching public health consequences, the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant psychological impact on people around the world. To gain further insight into this matter, we introduce the Real World Worry Waves Dataset (RW3D). The dataset combines rich open-ended free-text responses with survey data on emotions, significant life events, and psychological stressors in a repeated-measures design in the UK over three years (2020: n=2441, 2021: n=1716 and 2022: n=1152). This paper provides background information on the data collection procedure, the recorded variables, participants' demographics, and higher-order psychological and text-based derived variables that emerged from the data. The RW3D is a unique primary data resource that could inspire new research questions on the psychological impact of the pandemic, especially those that connect modalities (here: text data, psychological survey variables and demographics) over time.

Testing Human Ability To Detect Deepfake Images of Human Faces

Deepfakes are computationally-created entities that falsely represent reality. They can take image, video, and audio modalities, and pose a threat to many areas of systems and societies, comprising a topic of interest to various aspects of cybersecurity and cybersafety. In 2020 a workshop consulting AI experts from academia, policing, government, the private sector, and state security agencies ranked deepfakes as the most serious AI threat. These experts noted that since fake material can propagate through many uncontrolled routes, changes in citizen behaviour may be the only effective defence. This study aims to assess human ability to identify image deepfakes of human faces (StyleGAN2:FFHQ) from nondeepfake images (FFHQ), and to assess the effectiveness of simple interventions intended to improve detection accuracy. Using an online survey, 280 participants were randomly allocated to one of four groups: a control group, and 3 assistance interventions. Each participant was shown a sequence of 20 images randomly selected from a pool of 50 deepfake and 50 real images of human faces. Participants were asked if each image was AI-generated or not, to report their confidence, and to describe the reasoning behind each response. Overall detection accuracy was only just above chance and none of the interventions significantly improved this. Participants' confidence in their answers was high and unrelated to accuracy. Assessing the results on a per-image basis reveals participants consistently found certain images harder to label correctly, but reported similarly high confidence regardless of the image. Thus, although participant accuracy was 62% overall, this accuracy across images ranged quite evenly between 85% and 30%, with an accuracy of below 50% for one in every five images. We interpret the findings as suggesting that there is a need for an urgent call to action to address this threat.

Explainable Verbal Deception Detection using Transformers

People are regularly confronted with potentially deceptive statements (e.g., fake news, misleading product reviews, or lies about activities). Only few works on automated text-based deception detection have exploited the potential of deep learning approaches. A critique of deep-learning methods is their lack of interpretability, preventing us from understanding the underlying (linguistic) mechanisms involved in deception. However, recent advancements have made it possible to explain some aspects of such models. This paper proposes and evaluates six deep-learning models, including combinations of BERT (and RoBERTa), MultiHead Attention, co-attentions, and transformers. To understand how the models reach their decisions, we then examine the model's predictions with LIME. We then zoom in on vocabulary uniqueness and the correlation of LIWC categories with the outcome class (truthful vs deceptive). The findings suggest that our transformer-based models can enhance automated deception detection performances (+2.11% in accuracy) and show significant differences pertinent to the usage of LIWC features in truthful and deceptive statements.

Who is GPT-3? An Exploration of Personality, Values and Demographics

Language models such as GPT-3 have caused a furore in the research community. Some studies found that GPT-3 has some creative abilities and makes mistakes that are on par with human behaviour. This paper answers a related question: who is GPT-3? We administered two validated measurement tools to GPT-3 to assess its personality, the values it holds and its self-reported demographics. Our results show that GPT-3 scores similarly to human samples in terms of personality and - when provided with a model response memory - in terms of the values it holds. We provide the first evidence of psychological assessment of the GPT-3 model and thereby add to our understanding of the GPT-3 model. We close with suggestions for future research that moves social science closer to language models and vice versa.

Textwash -- automated open-source text anonymisation

The increased use of text data in social science research has benefited from easy-to-access data (e.g., Twitter). That trend comes at the cost of research requiring sensitive but hard-to-share data (e.g., interview data, police reports, electronic health records). We introduce a solution to that stalemate with the open-source text anonymisation software_Textwash_. This paper presents the empirical evaluation of the tool using the TILD criteria: a technical evaluation (how accurate is the tool?), an information loss evaluation (how much information is lost in the anonymisation process?) and a de-anonymisation test (can humans identify individuals from anonymised text data?). The findings suggest that Textwash performs similar to state-of-the-art entity recognition models and introduces a negligible information loss of 0.84%. For the de-anonymisation test, we tasked humans to identify individuals by name from a dataset of crowdsourced person descriptions of very famous, semi-famous and non-existing individuals. The de-anonymisation rate ranged from 1.01-2.01% for the realistic use cases of the tool. We replicated the findings in a second study and concluded that Textwash succeeds in removing potentially sensitive information that renders detailed person descriptions practically anonymous.

Detecting DeFi Securities Violations from Token Smart Contract Code with Random Forest Classification

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a system of financial products and services built and delivered through smart contracts on various blockchains. In the past year, DeFi has gained popularity and market capitalization. However, it has also become an epicenter of cryptocurrency-related crime, in particular, various types of securities violations. The lack of Know Your Customer requirements in DeFi has left governments unsure of how to handle the magnitude of offending in this space. This study aims to address this problem with a machine learning approach to identify DeFi projects potentially engaging in securities violations based on their tokens' smart contract code. We adapt prior work on detecting specific types of securities violations across Ethereum more broadly, building a random forest classifier based on features extracted from DeFi projects' tokens' smart contract code. The final classifier achieves a 99.1% F1-score. Such high performance is surprising for any classification problem, however, from further feature-level, we find a single feature makes this a highly detectable problem. Another contribution of our study is a new dataset, comprised of (a) a verified ground truth dataset for tokens involved in securities violations and (b) a set of valid tokens from a DeFi aggregator which conducts due diligence on the projects it lists. This paper further discusses the use of our model by prosecutors in enforcement efforts and connects its potential use to the wider legal context.