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How Random Is Random? Evaluating Randomness and Humaness of LLM Coin Flip (2024) (arxiv.org)
2 points by walterbell on Aug 22, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Chatbots were asked to produce random coin-flip sequences, then checked for the same predictable patterns people show when trying to be random. Two of them showed nearly every human bias, often more strongly, while the third acted more randomly.

Abstract · How Random is Random? Evaluating the Randomness and Humaness of LLMs' Coin Flips

One uniquely human trait is our inability to be random. We see and produce patterns where there should not be any and we do so in a predictable way. LLMs are supplied with human data and prone to human biases. In this work, we explore how LLMs approach randomness and where and how they fail through the lens of the well studied phenomena of generating binary random sequences. We find that GPT 4 and Llama 3 exhibit and exacerbate nearly every human bias we test in this context, but GPT 3.5 exhibits more random behavior. This dichotomy of randomness or humaness is proposed as a fundamental question of LLMs and that either behavior may be useful in different circumstances.

Katherine Van Koevering, Jon Kleinberg
arXiv:2406.00092 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted May 31, 2024
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