Human Misperception of Generative-AI Alignment: A Laboratory Experiment

Abstract: We conduct an incentivized laboratory experiment to study people's perception of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) alignment in the context of economic decision-making. Using a panel of economic problems spanning the domains of risk, time preference, social preference, and strategic interactions, we ask human subjects to make choices for themselves and to predict the choices made by GenAI on behalf of a human user. We find that people overestimate the degree of alignment between GenAI's choices and human choices. In every problem, human subjects' average prediction about GenAI's choice is substantially closer to the average human-subject choice than it is to the GenAI choice. At the individual level, different subjects' predictions about GenAI's choice in a given problem are highly correlated with their own choices in the same problem. We explore the implications of people overestimating GenAI alignment in a simple theoretical model.