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Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jun 28, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A test of 8,000 multiple-choice questions, built from validated human personality surveys and expanded into real-world situations, measures whether chatbots answer like consistent personalities. It found models do show distinct, steady traits shaped by their training data, and prompting rarely shifts certain traits.

Abstract · Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adaptation in various domains as conversational agents. We wonder: can personality tests be applied to these agents to analyze their behavior, similar to humans? We introduce TRAIT, a new benchmark consisting of 8K multi-choice questions designed to assess the personality of LLMs. TRAIT is built on two psychometrically validated small human questionnaires, Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Short Dark Triad (SD-3), enhanced with the ATOMIC-10X knowledge graph to a variety of real-world scenarios. TRAIT also outperforms existing personality tests for LLMs in terms of reliability and validity, achieving the highest scores across four key metrics: Content Validity, Internal Validity, Refusal Rate, and Reliability. Using TRAIT, we reveal two notable insights into personalities of LLMs: 1) LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality, which is highly influenced by their training data (e.g., data used for alignment tuning), and 2) current prompting techniques have limited effectiveness in eliciting certain traits, such as high psychopathy or low conscientiousness, suggesting the need for further research in this direction.

Seungbeen Lee, Seungwon Lim, Seungju Han, Giyeong Oh, Hyungjoo Chae, Jiwan Chung, Minju Kim, Beong-woo Kwak, Yeonsoo Lee, Dongha Lee, Jinyoung Yeo, Youngjae Yu
arXiv:2406.14703 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Jun 20, 2024 · updated Mar 19, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to NAACL2025 Findings

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