The Good, The Bad, and Why: Unveiling Emotions in Generative AI

Emotion significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in various tasks, it remains unclear whether they truly comprehend emotions. This paper aims to address this gap by incorporating psychological theories to gain a holistic understanding of emotions in generative AI models. Specifically, we propose three approaches: 1) EmotionPrompt to enhance AI model performance, 2) EmotionAttack to impair AI model performance, and 3) EmotionDecode to explain the effects of emotional stimuli, both benign and malignant. Through extensive experiments involving language and multi-modal models on semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and generation tasks, we demonstrate that both textual and visual EmotionPrompt can boost the performance of AI models while EmotionAttack can hinder it. Additionally, EmotionDecode reveals that AI models can comprehend emotional stimuli akin to the mechanism of dopamine in the human brain. Our work heralds a novel avenue for exploring psychology to enhance our understanding of generative AI models. This paper is an extended version of our previous work EmotionPrompt (arXiv:2307.11760).

Evaluating General-Purpose AI with Psychometrics

Artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed an evolution from task-specific to general-purpose systems that trend toward human versatility. As AI systems begin to play pivotal roles in society, it is important to ensure that they are adequately evaluated. Current AI benchmarks typically assess performance on collections of specific tasks. This has drawbacks when used for assessing general-purpose AI systems. First, it is difficult to predict whether AI systems could complete a new task it has never seen or that did not previously exist. Second, these benchmarks often focus on overall performance metrics, potentially overlooking the finer details crucial for making informed decisions. Lastly, there are growing concerns about the reliability of existing benchmarks and questions about what is being measured. To solve these challenges, this paper suggests that psychometrics, the science of psychological measurement, should be placed at the core of evaluating general-purpose AI. Psychometrics provides a rigorous methodology for identifying and measuring the latent constructs that underlie performance across multiple tasks. We discuss its merits, warn against potential pitfalls, and propose a framework for putting it into practice. Finally, we explore future opportunities to integrate psychometrics with AI.