Role-Play with Large Language Models
Authors: name: Murray Shanahan, name: Kyle McDonell, name: Laria Reynolds

As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, it is
imperative that we develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in
high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. In this
paper, we foreground the concept of role-play. Casting dialogue agent behaviour
in terms of role-play allows us to draw on familiar folk psychological terms,
without ascribing human characteristics to language models they in fact lack.
Two important cases of dialogue agent behaviour are addressed this way, namely
(apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness.