How Do Large Language Models Judge Social Attraction? Evidence from Theory-Grounded Persona Ratings Across Multiple LLMs and Humans

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to perform subjective evaluations traditionally made by humans, yet their validity as social judges remains unclear. This paper examines whether LLMs can assess social attraction from theory-grounded persona profiles constructed from ten psychological and relational constructs and organized into three tiers: socially attractive, socially mixed, and socially unattractive. We examine LLM ratings in two studies and compare them with human judgments in a third study. In Study 1, 34 LLMs rated 12 profiles across three repeated runs. Although some models tended to give higher or lower ratings overall, they showed strong stability across runs, consistent three-tier ordering, and high agreement in relative profile ordering. Study 2 examined sensitivity to gender presentation using six matched name-and-pronoun profile pairs and a separate pronoun-only test with a gender-neutral name, finding no significant effects in either analysis. In Study 3, 198 human participants evaluated the six matched profiles from Study 2. Their ratings reproduced the three-tier structure and followed a profile ordering consistent with that of the LLMs. However, LLMs rated attractive profiles more positively and unattractive profiles more negatively than humans, while neither group showed a significant overall effect of gender presentation.

When Robots Rate Their Own Interactions: Engagement Validity and the Strangeness Failure

Human-robot interaction (HRI) evaluation relies almost exclusively on human-completed questionnaires, leaving the robot's perspective unexamined. We propose an \textit{inverted evaluation}, in which LLM-powered robots complete the same standardized instruments from their own perspective, and test whether these ratings agree with human ground truth. In Study~1, five LLMs completed HRI-CUES, Godspeed, and RoSAS questionnaires for 25~interactions ($N = 1{,}522$ evaluations) from the HRI-CUES dataset. LLMs achieved moderate-to-strong agreement on engagement dimensions (satisfaction $r$ up to $.65$ and enjoyment $r$ up to $.72$) with excellent test-retest reliability (ICC $\geq .82$), but \textit{systematically inverted} the comfort/strangeness dimension ($r = -.44$ to $-.67$, all $p < .05$), conflating engagement with comfort. In Study~2, a Nao robot running Claude~Sonnet~4.5 replicated these patterns in live interactions ($N = 4$), including real-time turn-by-turn assessment. The strangeness failure persisted across five models, synthetic controls, and embodied deployment for two participants. We argue that current LLM-based robots lack access to the internal affective states needed to assess constructs like strangeness, and that inverted evaluation requires supplementary modalities (e.g., physiological signals, gaze, proxemics) to move beyond behavioral proxies. These findings establish boundary conditions for using LLMs as interaction evaluators in HRI.

A Linguistic Comparison between Human and ChatGPT-Generated Conversations

This study explores linguistic differences between human and LLM-generated dialogues, using 19.5K dialogues generated by ChatGPT-3.5 as a companion to the EmpathicDialogues dataset. The research employs Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis, comparing ChatGPT-generated conversations with human conversations across 118 linguistic categories. Results show greater variability and authenticity in human dialogues, but ChatGPT excels in categories such as social processes, analytical style, cognition, attentional focus, and positive emotional tone, reinforcing recent findings of LLMs being "more human than human." However, no significant difference was found in positive or negative affect between ChatGPT and human dialogues. Classifier analysis of dialogue embeddings indicates implicit coding of the valence of affect despite no explicit mention of affect in the conversations. The research also contributes a novel, companion ChatGPT-generated dataset of conversations between two independent chatbots, which were designed to replicate a corpus of human conversations available for open access and used widely in AI research on language modeling. Our findings increase understanding of ChatGPT's linguistic capabilities and inform ongoing efforts to distinguish between human and LLM-generated text, which is critical in detecting AI-generated fakes, misinformation, and disinformation.

A multilevel framework for AI governance

To realize the potential benefits and mitigate potential risks of AI, it is necessary to develop a framework of governance that conforms to ethics and fundamental human values. Although several organizations have issued guidelines and ethical frameworks for trustworthy AI, without a mediating governance structure, these ethical principles will not translate into practice. In this paper, we propose a multilevel governance approach that involves three groups of interdependent stakeholders: governments, corporations, and citizens. We examine their interrelationships through dimensions of trust, such as competence, integrity, and benevolence. The levels of governance combined with the dimensions of trust in AI provide practical insights that can be used to further enhance user experiences and inform public policy related to AI.

Trust in AI and Its Role in the Acceptance of AI Technologies

As AI-enhanced technologies become common in a variety of domains, there is an increasing need to define and examine the trust that users have in such technologies. Given the progress in the development of AI, a correspondingly sophisticated understanding of trust in the technology is required. This paper addresses this need by explaining the role of trust on the intention to use AI technologies. Study 1 examined the role of trust in the use of AI voice assistants based on survey responses from college students. A path analysis confirmed that trust had a significant effect on the intention to use AI, which operated through perceived usefulness and participants' attitude toward voice assistants. In study 2, using data from a representative sample of the U.S. population, different dimensions of trust were examined using exploratory factor analysis, which yielded two dimensions: human-like trust and functionality trust. The results of the path analyses from Study 1 were replicated in Study 2, confirming the indirect effect of trust and the effects of perceived usefulness, ease of use, and attitude on intention to use. Further, both dimensions of trust shared a similar pattern of effects within the model, with functionality-related trust exhibiting a greater total impact on usage intention than human-like trust. Overall, the role of trust in the acceptance of AI technologies was significant across both studies. This research contributes to the advancement and application of the TAM in AI-related applications and offers a multidimensional measure of trust that can be utilized in the future study of trustworthy AI.

DeepTalk: Vocal Style Encoding for Speaker Recognition and Speech Synthesis

Automatic speaker recognition algorithms typically use physiological speech characteristics encoded in the short term spectral features for characterizing speech audio. Such algorithms do not capitalize on the complementary and discriminative speaker-dependent characteristics present in the behavioral speech features. In this work, we propose a prosody encoding network called DeepTalk for extracting vocal style features directly from raw audio data. The DeepTalk method outperforms several state-of-the-art physiological speech characteristics-based speaker recognition systems across multiple challenging datasets. The speaker recognition performance is further improved by combining DeepTalk with a state-of-the-art physiological speech feature-based speaker recognition system. We also integrate the DeepTalk method into a current state-of-the-art speech synthesizer to generate synthetic speech. A detailed analysis of the synthetic speech shows that the DeepTalk captures F0 contours essential for vocal style modeling. Furthermore, DeepTalk-based synthetic speech is shown to be almost indistinguishable from real speech in the context of speaker recognition.