Scientists Use AI to Mimic the Mind, Warts and All

To better understand human cognition, scientists trained a large language model on 10 million psychology experiment questions. It now answers questions much like we do

- CARL ZIMMER

Companies like OpenAI and Meta are in a race to make something they like to call artificial general intelligence. But for all the money being spent on it, AGI has no settled definition. It's more of an aspiration to create something indistinguishable from the human mind.

But for now, artificial intelligence remains very distinguishable from the human kind. Many AI systems are good at one thing and one thing only. A grandmaster can drive a car to a chess tournament, but a chess-playing AI system is helpless behind the wheel. An AI chatbot can sometimes make very simple—and very weird—mistakes, like letting pawns move sideways in chess, an illegal move.

For all these shortcomings, an international team of scientists believe that AI systems can help them understand how the human mind works. They have created a ChatGPT-like system that can play the part of a human in a psychological experiment and behave as if it has a human mind. Details about the system, known as Centaur, were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. In recent decades, cognitive scientists have created sophisticated theories to explain various things that our minds can do: learn, recall memories, make decisions and more. To test these theories, cognitive scientists run experiments to see if human behavior matches a theory's predictions.

But each of these theories tackles only one feature of the mind. "Ultimately, we want to understand the human mind as a whole and see how these things are all connected," said Marcel Binz, a cognitive scientist at Helmholtz Munich, a German research center, and an author of the new study.