From Lexicons to Large Language Models: A Holistic Evaluation of Psychometric Text Analysis in Social Science Research
Research Spotlight Abstract Extracting psychological insights from text is vital for modern analytics, yet organizations often rely on analysis tools that are either biased and simplistic or prohibitively expensive to build. Our research demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a superior alternative. They match the accuracy of specialized artificial intelligence (AI), while significantly reducing costs and technical barriers. Crucially for policy considerations, we find LLMs are statistically fairer than traditional methods. In our tests, they reduced racial and gender bias by up to 60%. Beyond assessing performance, we introduce a practical technique called “cognitive-affective prompting.” By instructing the AI to adopt specific human strengths, such as using “superior reasoning” for complex tasks or “emotional intelligence” for sentiment analysis, practitioners can boost accuracy by over 10%. To facilitate adoption, we provide a user-friendly “cookbook” to help nonexperts apply these findings immediately. For policymakers and business leaders, this research validates LLMs as a robust, consistent, and equitable standard for analyzing human behavior at scale.
- Research Article
11
- 10.1287/ijds.2023.0007
- Apr 1, 2023
- INFORMS Journal on Data Science
How Can <i>IJDS</i> Authors, Reviewers, and Editors Use (and Misuse) Generative AI?
- Conference Article
- 10.1145/3711875.3729128
- Jun 23, 2025
While large language models (LLMs) are endowed with broad knowledge, their task-specific performance is often suboptimal. Fine-tuning LLMs with task-specific data from diverse nodes is necessary, but this data is typically safeguarded and not shared publicly due to privacy concerns. A common solution involves downstream nodes downloading the LLM locally and fine-tuning it with their proprietary data. However, owners often regard pre-trained LLMs as valuable assets and are reluctant to share them. Additionally, the significant computational resources required by LLMs make local fine-tuning impractical for many nodes. To mitigate these problems, this paper proposes CrossLM, a data-free collaborative fine-tuning framework for large and small language models. CrossLM enables resource-constrained nodes to train smaller language models (SLMs) using their private task-specific data. These SLMs are subsequently leveraged to promote the task-specific natural language generation and understanding capabilities of the LLMs. Simultaneously, the SLMs of nodes also benefit from enhancement by the fine-tuned LLMs. In this way, CrossLM avoids sharing private data and proprietary LLMs, and also reduces the resource requirements of nodes. Through extensive experiments across a range of benchmark tasks and popular language models, we demonstrate that CrossLM significantly boosts the task-specific performance of both LLMs and SLMs while preserving the generalization capabilities of LLMs.
- Research Article
136
- 10.1038/s41598-024-55686-2
- Mar 4, 2024
- Scientific reports
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform our lives and work through the content they generate, known as AI-Generated Content (AIGC). To harness this transformation, we need to understand the limitations of LLMs. Here, we investigate the bias of AIGC produced by seven representative LLMs, including ChatGPT and LLaMA. We collect news articles from The New York Times and Reuters, both known for their dedication to provide unbiased news. We then apply each examined LLM to generate news content with headlines of these news articles as prompts, and evaluate the gender and racial biases of the AIGC produced by the LLM by comparing the AIGC and the original news articles. We further analyze the gender bias of each LLM under biased prompts by adding gender-biased messages to prompts constructed from these news headlines. Our study reveals that the AIGC produced by each examined LLM demonstrates substantial gender and racial biases. Moreover, the AIGC generated by each LLM exhibits notable discrimination against females and individuals of the Black race. Among the LLMs, the AIGC generated by ChatGPT demonstrates the lowest level of bias, and ChatGPT is the sole model capable of declining content generation when provided with biased prompts.
- Front Matter
1
- 10.3389/frai.2024.1516832
- Nov 29, 2024
- Frontiers in artificial intelligence
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), are redefining how organizations operate, make decisions, and engage with customers. AI-driven technologies have become indispensable, providing businesses with powerful tools to streamline operations, derive actionable insights from vast data, and foster more meaningful customer interactions. For business leaders, scholars, and practitioners alike, understanding the transformative potential of AI isn’t just advantageous—it’s essential to staying competitive in an increasingly data-driven world.This editorial delves into recent scholarly advancements in LLM applications within business contexts, analyzing studies that explore AI’s potential across various domains, from decision support to creative industries. By introducing a structured framework, this editorial highlights key insights and contributions from recent studies, assessing their value to academia and industry. The following comparative analysis sheds light on how these innovations shape our understanding of AI’s role in business while pointing to future research directions.Puyt and Madsen's (2024) study stands out as a foundational exploration of LLM accuracy, assessing ChatGPT-4's ability to recount the history of the SWOT analysis-a vital business strategy tool. Their findings reveal that, while ChatGPT-4 effectively conveys general concepts, it struggles with detailed historical information, often producing inaccuracies or "hallucinations." This gap underscores the need for LLMs to be trained with verified academic data, particularly for strategic business applications that demand precision. This study not only contributes to the literature by proposing methods to evaluate AI accuracy in historical contexts but also highlights the importance of rigorous information vetting in industry settings where reliability is crucial.In contrast, Raikov et al. (2024) explore a hybrid intelligence model that combines LLM capabilities with explainable AI (XAI) principles to enhance human-machine collaboration. Their approach emphasizes cognitive semantics, improving transparency and decision-making efficiency. The hybrid model's real-time adaptability addresses the needs of complex, regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, where trust in AI decisions is paramount. Academically, this study provides a valuable addition to XAI literature by demonstrating how LLMs can bridge the gap between AI autonomy and human oversight, making it a model for future human-AI interactions in complex business environments.Another significant study by Mariotti and colleagues (2024) examines the integration of LLMs with enterprise knowledge graphs to enhance data-driven decision-making. By enabling organizations to leverage knowledge graphs for more accurate and scalable data retrieval, this research provides a robust framework for businesses seeking efficient knowledge management systems. The academic contribution here lies in advancing the dialogue between LLMs and knowledge graphs, emphasizing ethical data handling and quality standards essential for industry applications. For enterprises, the study offers practical solutions to achieve streamlined data management, balancing automation with privacy and security. 2024) take a different approach, investigating LLMs' role in creative industries, specifically within fashion design. They introduce a hybrid intelligence model that supports creative processes, allowing AI to complement rather than replace human ingenuity. While LLMs in this field demonstrate potential in automating repetitive design tasks and enhancing customer personalization, the study reveals limitations in AI's ability to handle spatial and stylistic nuances. This study's academic contribution lies in promoting human-AI co-creation, inspiring further research into AI applications across diverse creative sectors, including media and marketing.Collectively, these studies not only illuminate LLMs' transformative potential in business but also highlight critical ethical and operational considerations. Ensuring accuracy, transparency, and data privacy are vital to responsibly integrating AI into business workflows. Future research should focus on enhancing LLM accuracy, refining hybrid intelligence models, and exploring creative AI applications, all while maintaining ethical standards. As LLMs evolve, interdisciplinary collaborations will be essential to harness their full potential, making AI an ethical, effective, and innovative force in the business world.
- Research Article
- 10.1038/s41598-025-14875-3
- Aug 19, 2025
- Scientific reports
Large language models (LLMs) are the engines behind generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, the most well-known being chatbots. As conversational agents, they-much like the humans on whose data they are trained-exhibit social bias. The nature of social bias is that it unfairly represents one group over another. Explicit bias has been observed in LLMs in the form of racial and gender bias, but we know little about less visible implicit forms of social bias. Highly prevalent in society, implicit human bias is hard to mitigate due to a well-replicated phenomenon known as introspection illusion. This describes a strong propensity to underestimate biases in oneself and overestimate them in others-a form of 'bias blind spot'. In a series of studies with LLMs and humans, we measured variance in perception of others inherent in bias blind spot in order to determine if it was socially stratified, comparing ratings between LLMs and humans. We also assessed whether human bias blind spot extended to perceptions of LLMs. Results revealed perception of others to be socially stratified, such that those with lower educational, financial, and social status were perceived more negatively. This biased 'perception' was significantly more evident in the ratings of LLMs than of humans. Furthermore, we found evidence that humans were more blind to the likelihood of this bias in AI than in themselves. We discuss these findings in relation to AI, and how pursuing its responsible deployment requires contending with our own-as well as our technology's-bias blind spots.
- Discussion
- 10.1111/jgs.70177
- Oct 24, 2025
- Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
We thank Üçdal et al. for their thoughtful letter [1] advocating for the development and use of domain-specific large language models (LLMs) in healthcare in reference to our recent publication on the use of LLMs for identifying preoperative frailty among older adults using clinical notes [2]. They make interesting and valid points on how to ensure the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine is accurate, applicable, and transparent, just like any clinical tools that are developed and become widely used to evaluate and treat patients. We agree that identifying or building tools that specifically excel in clinical applications will be key in the future of AI as clinical tools. General-purpose LLMs, while powerful, may fall short in the contextual understanding of medical text and handling of unique clinical language used in medicine. These categories of language models are typically trained on broad internet corpora that include only a small fraction of biomedical literature, electronic health records, and guideline-based knowledge. As a result, they may generate fluent but factually incorrect answers (e.g., hallucinations)—a phenomenon that is particularly problematic when applied to high-stakes clinical settings. In contrast, domain-specific models are specifically pre-trained on curated biomedical text, peer-reviewed literature, and structured health data and may potentially reduce hallucination rates, increase the precision of medical terminology, and align more closely with established standards of care. Our study is one example that shows how general-purpose models compared to specialized models tailored to clinical contexts may likely underperform in healthcare-related tasks. However, this is not always the case, as demonstrated by another study that showed similar performances between domain-specific and general-purpose language models for identifying the need for preoperative cardiac evaluations [3]. Furthermore, general-purpose language models may be further fine-tuned with clinical notes or with optimized prompt engineering to improve performance for healthcare-related tasks [4]. Regardless, the concept is the same, in that leveraging LLMs for clinical tasks must take into consideration the knowledge base of its underlying foundation model for developing accurate AI-based tools for medicine. We agree with the authors' point that we need to ensure international relevance when using LLMs as clinical tools. Even within healthcare itself, AI models trained on certain subpopulations may still not be accurate and exhibit bias when used on another patient population [5]. It follows that a model that performs well within one country, trained on one patient population, may not generalize globally, particularly when guidelines, documentation styles, and patient demographics vary. Just as we validate clinical guidelines across populations, so too must we evaluate LLMs to ensure safe, equitable application [6]. In order to properly use models, clinicians need to understand not only what the result is but why. In order to properly develop and use clinical tools, we must understand them—the ethical principle behind explainability. Moving forward, it is important if we use AI models that we maintain transparency, as Ucdal et al. point out, with interpretability mechanisms to understand what models learn and why. We will hold LLMs and other AI tools to the same standard as all clinical tools used in medicine. As with any medical advancement, those developing and implementing the tool have responsibility for clinical validation, usability testing, post-deployment monitoring, and ongoing iteration based on real-world data. As healthcare moves toward an increased demand and utilization, AI technologies such as LLMs have come into play to streamline and improve care in a world of increasing workload and decreasing resources. As we have seen in various aspects of healthcare, including our study using LLMs to identify a difficult-to-quantify state such as frailty, LLMs and other aspects of AI increasingly show great potential in improving our ability to care for patients. Like with any clinical tool we use, it must be proven to improve and not compromise care. Along those lines, it is also critical to apply tools that are relevant and designed to perform well. Careful steps forward to make sure only AI technologies appropriate to the proposed usage, such as domain-specific LLMs, careful testing, validation, and transparency of models will ensure we are improving care and not causing harm to our patients. In this way, clinicians can learn about and lead healthcare toward the best direction forward using a complex but powerful technology. Y.Q.Z. contributed to the concept design and preparation of the manuscript. R.A.G. contributed to the concept design and preparation of the manuscript. The authors have nothing to report. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. This publication is linked to a related Letter to the Editor article by Üçdal et al. To view this article, visit https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.70171.
- Research Article
21
- 10.1016/j.joms.2024.11.007
- Mar 1, 2025
- Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Chatbots in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Board Exams: Performance and Potential
- Research Article
4
- 10.2196/65317
- May 12, 2025
- Journal of medical Internet research
Synthetic electronic health records (EHRs) generated by large language models (LLMs) offer potential for clinical education and model training while addressing privacy concerns. However, performance variations and demographic biases in these models remain underexplored, posing risks to equitable health care. This study aimed to systematically assess the performance of various LLMs in generating synthetic EHRs and to critically evaluate the presence of gender and racial biases in the generated outputs. We focused on assessing the completeness and representativeness of these EHRs across 20 diseases with varying demographic prevalence. A framework was developed to generate 140,000 synthetic EHRs using 10 standardized prompts across 7 LLMs. The electronic health record performance score (EPS) was introduced to quantify completeness, while the statistical parity difference (SPD) was proposed to assess the degree and direction of demographic bias. Chi-square tests were used to evaluate the presence of bias across demographic groups. Larger models exhibited superior performance but heightened biases. The Yi-34B achieved the highest EPS (96.8), while smaller models (Qwen-1.8B: EPS=63.35) underperformed. Sex polarization emerged: female-dominated diseases (eg, multiple sclerosis) saw amplified female representation in outputs (Qwen-14B: 973/1000, 97.3% female vs 564,424/744,778, 75.78% real; SPD=+21.50%), while balanced diseases and male-dominated diseases skewed the male group (eg, hypertension Llama 2-13 B: 957/1000, 95.7% male vs 79,540,040/152,466,669, 52.17% real; SPD=+43.50%). Racial bias patterns revealed that some models overestimated the representation of White (eg, Yi-6B: mean SPD +14.40%, SD 16.22%) or Black groups (eg, Yi-34B: mean SPD +14.90%, SD 27.16%), while most models systematically underestimated the representation of Hispanic (average SPD across 7 models is -11.93%, SD 8.36%) and Asian groups (average SPD across 7 models is -0.77%, SD 11.99%). Larger models, such as Yi-34B, Qwen-14B, and Llama 2 to 13 B, showed improved performance in generating more comprehensive EHRs, as reflected in higher EPS values. However, this increased performance was accompanied by a notable escalation in both gender and racial biases, highlighting a performance-bias trade-off. The study identified 4 key findings as follows: (1) as model size increased, EHR generation improved, but demographic biases also became more pronounced; (2) biases were observed across all models, not just the larger ones; (3) gender bias closely aligned with real-world disease prevalence, while racial bias was evident in only a subset of diseases; and (4) racial biases varied, with some diseases showing overrepresentation of White or Black populations and underrepresentation of Hispanic and Asian groups. These findings underline the need for effective bias mitigation strategies and the development of benchmarks to ensure fairness in artificial intelligence applications for health care.
- Research Article
- 10.1182/blood-2025-6214
- Nov 3, 2025
- Blood
Evaluating artificial intelligence (AI) as a clinical decision support tool for AML patients
- Research Article
4
- 10.1109/access.2024.3419079
- Jan 1, 2024
- IEEE Access
Large language models’ exceptional all-purpose abilities have made human-computer conversations normal, but for particular industries and verticals, they fall short of enhancing the expertise of knowledge and the timeliness of information. In order to give current information, and provide improved search capabilities, large language models need to increasingly incorporate specialist resources and databases. In this research, a model for intelligent assisted decision-making was proposed that the model incorporates knowledge from domain-specific databases and real-time data and uses large language models to offer expert tax guidance. The research proposed to overcome the limits of general-purpose language models and deliver specialized advise for tax-related inquiries by complementing large language models with domain-specific information.The results we achieve demonstrate that by offering tax advice tailored to a given situation, and the model we proposed goes beyond the validity of general large language language models. Our contribution is that not only exploring the combination of tax area and large language model, but also proposing a new effective model for government tax department to use in real life. This study highlights the potential of big language models for use in real-world professional domains and advances the field of domain-specific human-computer interaction.
- Research Article
27
- 10.1162/daed_e_01897
- May 1, 2022
- Daedalus
This dialogue is from an early scene in the 2014 film Ex Machina, in which Nathan has invited Caleb to determine whether Nathan has succeeded in creating artificial intelligence.1 The achievement of powerful artificial general intelligence has long held a grip on our imagination not only for its exciting as well as worrisome possibilities, but also for its suggestion of a new, uncharted era for humanity. In opening his 2021 BBC Reith Lectures, titled "Living with Artificial Intelligence," Stuart Russell states that "the eventual emergence of general-purpose artificial intelligence [will be] the biggest event in human history."2Over the last decade, a rapid succession of impressive results has brought wider public attention to the possibilities of powerful artificial intelligence. In machine vision, researchers demonstrated systems that could recognize objects as well as, if not better than, humans in some situations. Then came the games. Complex games of strategy have long been associated with superior intelligence, and so when AI systems beat the best human players at chess, Atari games, Go, shogi, StarCraft, and Dota, the world took notice. It was not just that Als beat humans (although that was astounding when it first happened), but the escalating progression of how they did it: initially by learning from expert human play, then from self-play, then by teaching themselves the principles of the games from the ground up, eventually yielding single systems that could learn, play, and win at several structurally different games, hinting at the possibility of generally intelligent systems.3Speech recognition and natural language processing have also seen rapid and headline-grabbing advances. Most impressive has been the emergence recently of large language models capable of generating human-like outputs. Progress in language is of particular significance given the role language has always played in human notions of intelligence, reasoning, and understanding. While the advances mentioned thus far may seem abstract, those in driverless cars and robots have been more tangible given their embodied and often biomorphic forms. Demonstrations of such embodied systems exhibiting increasingly complex and autonomous behaviors in our physical world have captured public attention.Also in the headlines have been results in various branches of science in which AI and its related techniques have been used as tools to advance research from materials and environmental sciences to high energy physics and astronomy.4 A few highlights, such as the spectacular results on the fifty-year-old protein-folding problem by AlphaFold, suggest the possibility that AI could soon help tackle science's hardest problems, such as in health and the life sciences.5While the headlines tend to feature results and demonstrations of a future to come, AI and its associated technologies are already here and pervade our daily lives more than many realize. Examples include recommendation systems, search, language translators - now covering more than one hundred languages - facial recognition, speech to text (and back), digital assistants, chatbots for customer service, fraud detection, decision support systems, energy management systems, and tools for scientific research, to name a few. In all these examples and others, AI-related techniques have become components of other software and hardware systems as methods for learning from and incorporating messy real-world inputs into inferences, predictions, and, in some cases, actions. As director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, Nick Bostrom noted back in 2006, "A lot of cutting-edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore."6As the scope, use, and usefulness of these systems have grown for individual users, researchers in various fields, companies and other types of organizations, and governments, so too have concerns when the systems have not worked well (such as bias in facial recognition systems), or have been misused (as in deepfakes), or have resulted in harms to some (in predicting crime, for example), or have been associated with accidents (such as fatalities from self-driving cars).7Dædalus last devoted a volume to the topic of artificial intelligence in 1988, with contributions from several of the founders of the field, among others. Much of that issue was concerned with questions of whether research in AI was making progress, of whether AI was at a turning point, and of its foundations, mathematical, technical, and philosophical-with much disagreement. However, in that volume there was also a recognition, or perhaps a rediscovery, of an alternative path toward AI - the connectionist learning approach and the notion of neural nets-and a burgeoning optimism for this approach's potential. Since the 1960s, the learning approach had been relegated to the fringes in favor of the symbolic formalism for representing the world, our knowledge of it, and how machines can reason about it. Yet no essay captured some of the mood at the time better than Hilary Putnam's "Much Ado About Not Very Much." Putnam questioned the Dædalus issue itself: "Why a whole issue of Dædalus? Why don't we wait until AI achieves something and then have an issue?" He concluded:This volume of Dædalus is indeed the first since 1988 to be devoted to artificial intelligence. This volume does not rehash the same debates; much else has happened since, mostly as a result of the success of the machine learning approach that was being rediscovered and reimagined, as discussed in the 1988 volume. This issue aims to capture where we are in AI's development and how its growing uses impact society. The themes and concerns herein are colored by my own involvement with AI. Besides the television, films, and books that I grew up with, my interest in AI began in earnest in 1989 when, as an undergraduate at the University of Zimbabwe, I undertook a research project to model and train a neural network.9 I went on to do research on AI and robotics at Oxford. Over the years, I have been involved with researchers in academia and labs developing AI systems, studying AI's impact on the economy, tracking AI's progress, and working with others in business, policy, and labor grappling with its opportunities and challenges for society.10The authors of the twenty-five essays in this volume range from AI scientists and technologists at the frontier of many of AI's developments to social scientists at the forefront of analyzing AI's impacts on society. The volume is organized into ten sections. Half of the sections are focused on AI's development, the other half on its intersections with various aspects of society. In addition to the diversity in their topics, expertise, and vantage points, the authors bring a range of views on the possibilities, benefits, and concerns for society. I am grateful to the authors for accepting my invitation to write these essays.Before proceeding further, it may be useful to say what we mean by artificial intelligence. The headlines and increasing pervasiveness of AI and its associated technologies have led to some conflation and confusion about what exactly counts as AI. This has not been helped by the current trend-among researchers in science and the humanities, startups, established companies, and even governments-to associate anything involving not only machine learning, but data science, algorithms, robots, and automation of all sorts with AI. This could simply reflect the hype now associated with AI, but it could also be an acknowledgment of the success of the current wave of AI and its related techniques and their wide-ranging use and usefulness. I think both are true; but it has not always been like this. In the period now referred to as the AI winter, during which progress in AI did not live up to expectations, there was a reticence to associate most of what we now call AI with AI.Two types of definitions are typically given for AI. The first are those that suggest that it is the ability to artificially do what intelligent beings, usually human, can do. For example, artificial intelligence is:The human abilities invoked in such definitions include visual perception, speech recognition, the capacity to reason, solve problems, discover meaning, generalize, and learn from experience. Definitions of this type are considered by some to be limiting in their human-centricity as to what counts as intelligence and in the benchmarks for success they set for the development of AI (more on this later). The second type of definitions try to be free of human-centricity and define an intelligent agent or system, whatever its origin, makeup, or method, as:This type of definition also suggests the pursuit of goals, which could be given to the system, self-generated, or learned.13 That both types of definitions are employed throughout this volume yields insights of its own.These definitional distinctions notwithstanding, the term AI, much to the chagrin of some in the field, has come to be what cognitive and computer scientist Marvin Minsky called a "suitcase word."14 It is packed variously, depending on who you ask, with approaches for achieving intelligence, including those based on logic, probability, information and control theory, neural networks, and various other learning, inference, and planning methods, as well as their instantiations in software, hardware, and, in the case of embodied intelligence, systems that can perceive, move, and manipulate objects.Three questions cut through the discussions in this volume: 1) Where are we in AI's development? 2) What opportunities and challenges does AI pose for society? 3) How much about AI is really about us?Notions of intelligent machines date all the way back to antiquity.15 Philosophers, too, among them Hobbes, Leibnitz, and Descartes, have been dreaming about AI for a long time; Daniel Dennett suggests that Descartes may have even anticipated the Turing Test.16 The idea of computation-based machine intelligence traces to Alan Turing's invention of the universal Turing machine in the 1930s, and to the ideas of several of his contemporaries in the mid-twentieth century. But the birth of artificial intelligence as we know it and the use of the term is generally attributed to the now famed Dartmouth summer workshop of 1956. The workshop was the result of a proposal for a two-month summer project by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon whereby "An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves."17In their respective contributions to this volume, "From So Simple a Beginning: Species of Artificial Intelligence" and "If We Succeed," and in different but complementary ways, Nigel Shadbolt and Stuart Russell chart the key ideas and developments in AI, its periods of excitement as well as the aforementioned AI winters. The current AI spring has been underway since the 1990s, with headline-grabbing breakthroughs appearing in rapid succession over the last ten years or so: a period that Jeffrey Dean describes in the title of his essay as a "golden decade," not only for the pace of AI development but also its use in a wide range of sectors of society, as well as areas of scientific research.18 This period is best characterized by the approach to achieve artificial intelligence through learning from experience, and by the success of neural networks, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, together with methods from probability theory, as ways for machines to learn.19A brief history may be useful here: In the 1950s, there were two dominant visions of how to achieve machine intelligence. One vision was to use computers to create a logic and symbolic representation of the world and our knowledge of it and, from there, create systems that could reason about the world, thus exhibiting intelligence akin to the mind. This vision was most espoused by Allen Newell and Hebert Simon, along with Marvin Minsky and others. Closely associated with it was the "heuristic search" approach that supposed intelligence was essentially a problem of exploring a space of possibilities for answers. The second vision was inspired by the brain, rather than the mind, and sought to achieve intelligence by learning. In what became known as the connectionist approach, units called perceptrons were connected in ways inspired by the connection of neurons in the brain. At the time, this approach was most associated with Frank Rosenblatt. While there was initial excitement about both visions, the first came to dominate, and did so for decades, with some successes, including so-called expert systems.Not only did this approach benefit from championing by its advocates and plentiful funding, it came with the suggested weight of a long intellectual tradition-exemplified by Descartes, Boole, Frege, Russell, and Church, among others-that sought to manipulate symbols and to formalize and axiomatize knowledge and reasoning. It was only in the late 1980s that interest began to grow again in the second vision, largely through the work of David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, James McClelland, and others. The history of these two visions and the associated philosophical ideas are discussed in Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus's 1988 Dædalus essay "Making a Mind Versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branchpoint."20 Since then, the approach to intelligence based on learning, the use of statistical methods, back-propagation, and training (supervised and unsupervised) has come to characterize the current dominant approach.Kevin Scott, in his essay "I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Work & Scale," reminds us of the work of Ray Solomonoff and others linking information and probability theory with the idea of machines that can not only learn, but compress and potentially generalize what they learn, and the emerging realization of this in the systems now being built and those to come. The success of the machine learning approach has benefited from the boon in the availability of data to train the algorithms thanks to the growth in the use of the Internet and other applications and services. In research, the data explosion has been the result of new scientific instruments and observation platforms and data-generating breakthroughs, for example, in astronomy and in genomics. Equally important has been the co-evolution of the software and hardware used, especially chip architectures better suited to the parallel computations involved in data- and compute-intensive neural networks and other machine learning approaches, as Dean discusses.Several authors delve into progress in key subfields of AI.21 In their essay, "Searching for Computer Vision North Stars," Fei-Fei Li and Ranjay Krishna chart developments in machine vision and the creation of standard data sets such as ImageNet that could be used for benchmarking performance. In their respective essays "Human Language Understanding & Reasoning" and "The Curious Case of Commonsense Intelligence," Chris Manning and Yejin Choi discuss different eras and ideas in natural language processing, including the recent emergence of large language models comprising hundreds of billions of parameters and that use transformer architectures and self-supervised learning on vast amounts of data.22 The resulting pretrained models are impressive in their capacity to take natural language prompts for which they have not been trained specifically and generate human-like outputs, not only in natural language, but also images, software code, and more, as Mira Murati discusses and illustrates in "Language & Coding Creativity." Some have started to refer to these large language models as foundational models in that once they are trained, they are adaptable to a wide range of tasks and outputs.23 But despite their unexpected performance, these large language models are still early in their development and have many shortcomings and limitations that are highlighted in this volume and elsewhere, including by some of their developers.24In "The Machines from Our Future," Daniela Rus discusses the progress in robotic systems, including advances in the underlying technologies, as well as in their integrated design that enables them to operate in the physical world. She highlights the limitations in the "industrial" approaches used thus far and suggests new ways of conceptualizing robots that draw on insights from biological systems. In robotics, as in AI more generally, there has always been a tension as to whether to copy or simply draw inspiration from how humans and other biological organisms achieve intelligent behavior. Elsewhere, AI researcher Demis Hassabis and colleagues have explored how neuroscience and AI learn from and inspire each other, although so far more in one than the other, as and have the success of the current approaches to AI, there are still many shortcomings and as well as problems in It is useful to on one such as when AI does not as or or or that can to or when it on or information about the world, or when it has such as of all of which can to a of public shortcomings have captured the attention of the wider public and as well as among there is an on AI and In recent years, there has been a of to principles and approaches to AI, as well as involving and such as the on AI, that to best important has been the of with to and - in the and developing AI in both and as has been well in recent This is an important in its own but also with to the of the resulting AI and, in its intersections with more the other there are limitations and problems associated with the that AI is not capable of if could to more more or more general AI. In their Turing deep learning and Geoffrey took of where deep learning and highlighted its current such as the with In the case of natural language processing, Manning and Choi the challenges in and despite the of large language Elsewhere, and have the notion that large language models do anything learning, or In & of in a and discuss the problems in systems, the as how to reason about other their systems, and well as challenges in both and especially when the include both humans and Elsewhere, and others a useful of the problems in there is a growing among many that we do not have for the of AI systems, especially as they become more capable and the of use although AI and its related techniques are to be powerful tools for research in science, as examples in this volume and recent examples in which AI not only help results but also by design and become what some have AI to science and and to and challenges for the possibility that more powerful AI could to new in science, as well as progress in some of challenges and has long been a key for many at the frontier of AI research to more capable the of each of AI, the of more general problems that to the possibility of more capable AI learning, reasoning, of and and of these and other problems that could to more capable systems the of whether current characterized by deep learning, the of and and more foundational and and reinforcement or whether different approaches are in such as cognitive agent approaches or or based on logic and probability theory, to name a few. whether and what of approaches be the AI is but many the current along with of and learning architectures have to their about the of the current approaches is associated with the of whether artificial general intelligence can be and if how and Artificial general intelligence is in to what is called that AI and for tasks and goals, such as The development of on the other aims for more powerful AI - at as powerful as is generally to problem or and, in some the capacity to and improve as well as set and its own and the of and when will be is a for most that its achievement have and as is often in and such as A through and The to Ex and it is or there is growing among many at the frontier of AI research that we for the possibility of powerful with to and and with humans, its and use, and the possibility that of could and that we these into how we approach the development of of the research and development, and in AI is of the AI and in its what Nigel Shadbolt the of AI. This is given the for useful and applications and the for in sectors of the However, a few have made the development of their the most of these are and each of which has demonstrated results of increasing still a long way from the most discussed impact of AI and automation is on and the future of This is not In in the of the excitement about AI and and concerns about their impact on a on and the was that such technologies were important for growth and and "the that but not Most recent of this including those I have been involved have and that over time, more are than are that it is the and the and the of will the In their essay AI & and John discuss these for work and further, in & the of & to discuss the with to and and as well as the opportunities that are especially in developing In "The Turing The & of Artificial Intelligence," discusses how the use of human benchmarks in the development of AI the of AI that rather than human He that the AI's development will take in this and resulting for will on the for companies, and a that the that more will be than too much from of the and does not far enough into the future and at what AI will be capable The for AI could from of that in the is and labor and ability to are and and until automation has mostly physical and but that AI will be on more cognitive and tasks based on and, if early examples are even tasks are not of the In other are now in the world machines that that learn and that their ability to do these is to a range of problems they can will be with the range to which the human has been This was and Allen Newell in that this time could be different usually two that new labor will in which will by other humans for their own even when machines may be capable of these as well as or even better than The other is that AI will create so much and all without the for human and the of will be to for when that will the that once the first time since his creation will be with his his to use his from how to the which science and interest will have for to live and and However, most researchers that we are not to a future in which the of will and that until then, there are other and that be in the labor now and in the such as and other and how humans work increasingly capable that and John and discuss in this are not the only of the by AI. Russell a of the potentially from artificial general intelligence, once a of or ten But even we to general-purpose AI, the opportunities for companies and, for the and growth as well as from AI and its related technologies are more than to pursuit and by companies and in the development, and use of AI. At the many the is it is generally that is a in AI, as by its growth in AI research, and as highlighted in several will have for companies and given the of such technologies as discussed by and others the may in the way of approaches to AI and (such as whether they are companies or as and have have the to to in AI. The role of AI in intelligence, systems, autonomous even and other of increasingly In &
- Research Article
- 10.15353/un-disturbed.v2i2.6652
- Dec 2, 2025
- (Un)Disturbed: A Journal of Feminist Voices
ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM) based chatbots have amassed millions of users in the past few years, prompting great interest in other LLM applications. In particular, there has been substantial research into the potential use of LLMs in mental health settings (Muetenda et al. 2025; Olawade et al. 2024). However, given that artificial intelligence (AI) has been found to demonstrate gender and racial biases (among other types) (Klein and D’Ignazio 2024), it is important to examine the ethical implications of such technologies. In this essay, I will examine the use of LLMs in therapeutic contexts through the lens of data feminism in AI (Klein and D’Ignazio 2024), a set of intersectional feminist principles introduced by Klein and D’Ignazio to challenge the power imbalances in data science and AI by exploring potential risks and offering suggestions to avoid them. It is important to note that the intersectional feminist lens is far from exhaustive; thus, future work should examine the use of LLMs in mental health care from other perspectives as well to prevent harm and ensure that the benefits of technological developments are spread equitably. I can easily imagine a future where LLMs are used to make mental health care more accessible and effective for everyone; I can just as easily imagine a future where they are weaponized to further subjugate disenfranchised communities. How do we steer towards the future we want? In this essay I hope to start exploring the answer to this question.
- Research Article
149
- 10.1097/corr.0000000000002704
- May 23, 2023
- Clinical orthopaedics and related research
Advances in neural networks, deep learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) have progressed recently. Previous deep learning AI has been structured around domain-specific areas that are trained on dataset-specific areas of interest that yield high accuracy and precision. A new AI model using large language models (LLM) and nonspecific domain areas, ChatGPT (OpenAI), has gained attention. Although AI has demonstrated proficiency in managing vast amounts of data, implementation of that knowledge remains a challenge. (1) What percentage of Orthopaedic In-Training Examination questions can a generative, pretrained transformer chatbot (ChatGPT) answer correctly? (2) How does that percentage compare with results achieved by orthopaedic residents of different levels, and if scoring lower than the 10th percentile relative to 5th-year residents is likely to correspond to a failing American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery score, is this LLM likely to pass the orthopaedic surgery written boards? (3) Does increasing question taxonomy affect the LLM's ability to select the correct answer choices? This study randomly selected 400 of 3840 publicly available questions based on the Orthopaedic In-Training Examination and compared the mean score with that of residents who took the test over a 5-year period. Questions with figures, diagrams, or charts were excluded, including five questions the LLM could not provide an answer for, resulting in 207 questions administered with raw score recorded. The LLM's answer results were compared with the Orthopaedic In-Training Examination ranking of orthopaedic surgery residents. Based on the findings of an earlier study, a pass-fail cutoff was set at the 10th percentile. Questions answered were then categorized based on the Buckwalter taxonomy of recall, which deals with increasingly complex levels of interpretation and application of knowledge; comparison was made of the LLM's performance across taxonomic levels and was analyzed using a chi-square test. ChatGPT selected the correct answer 47% (97 of 207) of the time, and 53% (110 of 207) of the time it answered incorrectly. Based on prior Orthopaedic In-Training Examination testing, the LLM scored in the 40th percentile for postgraduate year (PGY) 1s, the eighth percentile for PGY2s, and the first percentile for PGY3s, PGY4s, and PGY5s; based on the latter finding (and using a predefined cutoff of the 10th percentile of PGY5s as the threshold for a passing score), it seems unlikely that the LLM would pass the written board examination. The LLM's performance decreased as question taxonomy level increased (it answered 54% [54 of 101] of Tax 1 questions correctly, 51% [18 of 35] of Tax 2 questions correctly, and 34% [24 of 71] of Tax 3 questions correctly; p = 0.034). Although this general-domain LLM has a low likelihood of passing the orthopaedic surgery board examination, testing performance and knowledge are comparable to that of a first-year orthopaedic surgery resident. The LLM's ability to provide accurate answers declines with increasing question taxonomy and complexity, indicating a deficiency in implementing knowledge. Current AI appears to perform better at knowledge and interpretation-based inquires, and based on this study and other areas of opportunity, it may become an additional tool for orthopaedic learning and education.
- Research Article
175
- 10.1145/3643540
- Mar 6, 2024
- Proceedings of the ACM on interactive, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous technologies
Advances in large language models (LLMs) have empowered a variety of applications. However, there is still a significant gap in research when it comes to understanding and enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in the field of mental health. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs on various mental health prediction tasks via online text data, including Alpaca, Alpaca-LoRA, FLAN-T5, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. We conduct a broad range of experiments, covering zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and instruction fine-tuning. The results indicate a promising yet limited performance of LLMs with zero-shot and few-shot prompt designs for mental health tasks. More importantly, our experiments show that instruction finetuning can significantly boost the performance of LLMs for all tasks simultaneously. Our best-finetuned models, Mental-Alpaca and Mental-FLAN-T5, outperform the best prompt design of GPT-3.5 (25 and 15 times bigger) by 10.9% on balanced accuracy and the best of GPT-4 (250 and 150 times bigger) by 4.8%. They further perform on par with the state-of-the-art task-specific language model. We also conduct an exploratory case study on LLMs' capability on mental health reasoning tasks, illustrating the promising capability of certain models such as GPT-4. We summarize our findings into a set of action guidelines for potential methods to enhance LLMs' capability for mental health tasks. Meanwhile, we also emphasize the important limitations before achieving deployability in real-world mental health settings, such as known racial and gender bias. We highlight the important ethical risks accompanying this line of research.
- Research Article
68
- 10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102722
- Feb 22, 2024
- Critical Perspectives on Accounting
New large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have the potential to change qualitative research by contributing to every stage of the research process from generating interview questions to structuring research publications. However, it is far from clear whether such ‘assistance’ will enable or deskill and eventually displace the qualitative researcher. This paper sets out to explore the implications for qualitative research of the recently emerged capabilities of LLMs; how they have acquired their seemingly ‘human-like’ capabilities to ‘converse’ with us humans, and in what ways these capabilities are deceptive or misleading. Building on a comparison of the different ‘trainings’ of humans and LLMs, the paper first traces the seemingly human-like qualities of the LLM to the human proclivity to project communicative intent into or onto LLMs’ purely imitative capacity to predict the structure of human communication. It then goes on to detail the ways in which such human-like communication is deceptive and misleading in relation to the absolute ‘certainty’ with which LLMs ‘converse’, their intrinsic tendencies to ‘hallucination’ and ‘sycophancy’, the narrow conception of ‘artificial intelligence’, LLMs’ complete lack of ethical sensibility or capacity for responsibility, and finally the feared danger of an ‘emergence’ of ‘human-competitive’ or ‘superhuman’ LLM capabilities. The paper concludes by noting the potential dangers of the widespread use of LLMs as ‘mediators’ of human self-understanding and culture. A postscript offers a brief reflection on what only humans can do as qualitative researchers.