Who is GPT -3? An exploration of personality, values and demographics (2022)

Abstract: Language models such as GPT-3 have caused a furore in the research community. Some studies found that GPT-3 has some creative abilities and makes mistakes that are on par with human behaviour. This paper answers a related question: Who is GPT-3? We administered two validated measurement tools to GPT-3 to assess its personality, the values it holds and its self-reported demographics. Our results show that GPT-3 scores similarly to human samples in terms of personality and - when provided with a model response memory - in terms of the values it holds. We provide the first evidence of psychological assessment of the GPT-3 model and thereby add to our understanding of this language model. We close with suggestions for future research that moves social science closer to language models and vice versa.

## introduction the introduction of large language models has sparked awe and controversy alike. the most prominent of such models is open ai's gpt-3a 175-billion parameter auto-regressive language model trained on a large amount of text data (300 billion tokens), utilising the transformer architecture @xcite @xcite . part of the furore around gpt-3 stems from its ability, not only to read and comprehend text data and answer questions, but to generate natural language at a level often indistinguishable from a text produced by humans @xcite . this paper adds to a young line of research that studies gpt-3 through the lens of psychological methods. we do this to answer a simple question: if gpt-3 were to be studied as a person, who is gpt-3? ## method we administered two validated measurement tools to map out the model's personality (the hexaco scale) and its values (the human values scale). for each questionnaire, we used the original items and modified the task instructions into gpt-3 prompts. ## discussion this paper was motivated by the need to understand language models (here: gpt-3) for applications in computational social science. we focused on the simple question: if we were to treat gpt-3 as a human participant, who is gpt-3?. ## conclusion this paper examined who gpt-3 is, thereby adding a new flavour to efforts to understand the powerful language model. we found that the model does contain traces of a personality profile, has values to which it assigns varying degrees of importance and falls in a relatively young adult demographic. these findings can help future work that bridges the gap between social science use cases and language models.