Psychobabble A new study suggests that advanced AI models are pretty good at acting dumber than they are — which might have massive implications as they continue to get smarter. Published in the journal PLOS One, researchers from Berlin’s Humboldt University found that when testing out a large language model (LLM) on so-called “theory of mind” criteria, they found that not only can AI mimic the language learning stages exhibited in children, but seem to express something akin to the mental capabilities related to those stages as well. In an interview with PsyPost, Humboldt University research assistant and main study author Anna Maklová, who also happens to be a psycholinguistics expert, explained how her field of study relates to the fascinating finding. “Thanks to psycholinguistics, we have a relatively comprehensive understanding of what children are capable of at various ages,” Marklová told the outlet. “In particular, the theory of mind plays a significant role, as it explores the inner world of the child and is not easily emulated by observing simple statistical patterns.” Dumb It Down With a children-oriented theory of mind as a backdrop, the researcher and her colleagues at Charles University in Prague sought to determine if LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 “can pretend to be less capable than they are.” To figure that out, the mostly-Czech research team instructed the models to act like a child between the progressive ages of one to six years when giving responses. When put through a battery of more than 1,000 trials and…AI Can Pretend To Be Stupider Than It Really Is, Scientists Find