Can AI ever fully understand human psychology?
Artificial intelligence is still way behind an infant in making basic psychological inferences, a study comparing the two finds.
An 11-month-old can make basic inferences about the goals, intentions and preferences of others that AI still struggles with.
The research shows the leaps AI still has to make in order to go beyond computation to human-like cognition.
Understanding motivation
The conclusions come from a study that had 11-month-old infants watching a series of animated shapes moving around the screen.
The movement of the shapes was designed to replicate basic human behaviour and decision-making.
Both infants and the AI, which had been trained on thousands of examples, were tested on what they understood about the videos.
The results were summed up by Dr Moira Dillon, study co-author:
“Adults and even infants can easily make reliable inferences about what drives other people’s actions.
Current AI finds these inferences challenging to make.”
The infants demonstrated, for example, that they know that invisible human motivations persist across environments (in other words, we keep striving for things we want no matter where we are).
The surprise paradigm
Scientists infer preverbal children’s understanding with a so-called ‘surprise paradigm’.
Over the decades, researchers have found that infants tend to look longer at things which surprise them.
The AI, though, could not understand the underlying motivations enacted by the shapes in the video.
In other words, it was not ‘surprised’ when the unwritten laws of human behaviour were suddenly changed or the environment was different.
Dr Brenden Lake, study co-author, said:
“If AI aims to build flexible, commonsense thinkers like human adults become, then machines should draw upon the same core abilities infants possess in detecting goals and preferences.”
Human thought is flexible, applicable to many situations and contexts, Dr Dillon said:
“A human infant’s foundational knowledge is limited, abstract, and reflects our evolutionary inheritance, yet it can accommodate any context or culture in which that infant might live and learn.”
AI ‘thought’, in contrast, is still very limited when it comes to understanding human psychology.
Related
- Artificial intelligence can help doctors treat depression more effectively.
- Digital technology is supplementing our thinking skills rather than weakening them.
The study was published in the journal Cognition (Stojnić et al., 2023).
