Abstract: Modern AI systems such as LLMs are pervasive and helpful, but do they really have the social intelligence to seamlessly and safely engage in interactions with humans? In this talk, I will delve into the limits of social intelligence of LLMs and how we can measure and anticipate their risks.
First, I will introduce Sotopia, a new social simulation environment to evaluate the interaction abilities of LLMs as social AI agents. I will show how today's most powerful models struggle to socially interact due to inability to deal with information asymmetry.
Then, I will shift to how LLMs pose new ethical challenges in their interactions with users. Specifically, through their language modality and possible expressions of uncertainty, we show that LLMs tend to express overconfidence in their answers even when incorrect, which users tend to over-rely on.
Finally, I will introduce ParticipAI, a new framework to anticipate future AI use cases and dilemmas. Through our framework, we show that lay users can help us anticipate the benefits and harms of allowing or not allowing an AI use case, paving the way for more democratic approaches to AI design, development, and governance. I will conclude with some thoughts on future directions towards socially aware and ethically informed AI.

Bio: Maarten Sap is an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Department (CMU LTI), and a part-time research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. His research focuses on making NLP systems socially intelligent, and understanding social inequality and bias in language. He has presented his work in top-tier NLP and AI conferences, receiving paper awards or nominations at EMNLP 2023, ACL 2023, FAccT 2023, WeCNLP 2020, and ACL 2019. His research has been covered in the press, including the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Vox, and more.
Before joining CMU, he was a postdoc/young investigator at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) on project MOSAIC. He received his PhD from the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering where he was advised by Yejin Choi and Noah Smith.

Website: https://maartensap.com/