In academia and the media, AI is often described as mirroring human psychology with humanlike reasoning, human-level performance, human-like communication. In these comparisons, “humans” are treated as the benchmark.
In a provocative 2023 paper, researchers at Harvard University asked – which humans?
The diversity of human psychologies has been a hot topic since 2010, when researchers found that many accepted psychological “truths” were often confined to so-called “WEIRD people”: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. What feel like universal beliefs for people like me and no doubt many of the readers of this blog, e.g. that I am an automonous individual, are instead only true for a thin slice of humanity.
So when we say AI tools are “human-like”, what we mean is that AI is WEIRD.
In fact, this paper found that more than that, it thinks American. The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values. For countries like Libya and Pakistan, AI results are little better than a coin toss.