Role play with large language models.

Journal: Nature
PMID:

Abstract

As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, we must develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. Here we foreground the concept of role play. Casting dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play allows us to draw on familiar folk psychological terms, without ascribing human characteristics to language models that they in fact lack. Two important cases of dialogue-agent behaviour are addressed this way, namely, (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness.

Authors

  • Murray Shanahan
    DeepMind, London, UK; Imperial College London, London, UK. Electronic address: m.shanahan@imperial.ac.uk.
  • Kyle McDonell
    Eleuther AI, New York, NY, USA. kyle@eleuther.ai.
  • Laria Reynolds
    Eleuther AI, New York, NY, USA. laria@eleuther.ai.