Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as stand-ins for human respondents, from opinion polls and simulated survey participants to agent-based social simulations. These uses rest on one assumption: that conditioning a model on who a person is yields answers resembling those of real people from that group. Here we identify and measure benevolence bias, a small but consistent tendency for aligned LLMs to lean toward the kinder, safer, more socially approved answer on value-laden survey questions. Across 18 widely used models, four social-science datasets (ANES, GSS, WVS, and a cross-cultural prospect-theory replication) and six psychological categories, we find that the bias is a stable model property, not a quirk of any one system: it points the same way across models, grows with model size, and traces to the post-training stage. Prompt language and framing change its size but never its direction, and a "malicious persona" stress test shows a one-sided limit: aligned models struggle to play people who are less kind, less prosocial or more harm-tolerant than average. The issue is thus not only a shifted average, but a narrowed range of people the model can imitate. The bias sits in the middle of the answer distribution rather than its tails, and survives changes in sampling temperature and simple prompted reflection. The encouraging news is that it is easy to diagnose and straightforward to fix: a light-touch contrastive calibration, which needs no retraining and works on black-box APIs, brings all six categories back to the human baseline. Our results give researchers a clear map of where aligned LLMs can already be trusted as human stand-ins, where they need care, and a ready-to-use method for closing the gap.
A recurring proposal in legal AI is to improve case-outcome prediction by fusing uncertainty tools (evidence graphs with belief propagation, sequential Bayesian odds updating, Dempster-Shafer combination, and conformal prediction) into one pipeline. We test this on 1,000 real European Court of Human Rights cases from LexGLUE and FairLex, predicting whether the Court found a Convention violation from the case's fact paragraphs. We compare three families across two frontier LLMs (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5) as per-fact evidence estimators: (A) the raw LLM, (B) the LLM routed through the fusion pipeline, and (C) a term-frequency baseline through the same pipeline. Across roughly 4,750 tests we find: (1) on discrimination (AUROC around 0.83) the pipeline yields no improvement over either the raw LLM or the baseline; a frontier LLM used directly is the strongest single discriminator. (2) Naively composing an LLM with Bayesian-odds and Dempster-Shafer fusion more than doubles calibration error (ECE from about 0.16 to 0.46) via a prior-mismatch mechanism that replicates across both models. (3) Dempster-Shafer fusion is actively unsafe on long chains, committing confidently to wrong labels at below-chance accuracy; we recommend removing it. (4) The pipeline's genuine value is operational: routed through a conformal selective-prediction layer, the system decides which cases to automate and which to escalate. After removing Dempster-Shafer, recalibrating, and applying class-conditional risk control on the full 1,000-case set, the tuned engine auto-clears at 96.8 percent accuracy with 0.5 percent errors escaping and 96.3 percent caught for review, versus 85.9 / 3.8 / 72.1 for an untuned baseline. The contribution of such pipelines in law is calibrated trust, not sharper prediction.
AI-assisted research has entered a stage in which the central question is not only whether systems can generate hypotheses, run experiments, or produce manuscripts, but whether their scientific claims are calibrated to the evidence that supports them. This Perspective-style paper develops a conceptual and methodological framework for evidence-licensed claims in AI-assisted research. Motivated by representative routes including specialized scientific foundation models, LLM research assistants, multi-agent co-scientists, AI Scientist pipelines, mathematical discovery agents, and self-driving laboratories, it represents AI-assisted research as five operators: hypothesis generation, model-mediated consequence derivation, external validation, belief update, and claim calibration. The central claim is that calibration is not merely cautious wording but a mechanism for managing scientific assertion rights: evidence licenses some forms of speech and withholds others. The paper distinguishes linguistic, consequence-based, interventional, and evidence-licensed semantics; defines the claim-evidence gap and epistemic debt; and treats minimal structural reconstruction across heterogeneous outputs as an upward form of claim calibration. AISim-Cal is included as an illustrative synthetic dynamics exercise, not as an empirical forecast or benchmark. The resulting principles are: no claim without license, validation does not determine claim level, and automation amplifies the need for calibration. Reliable AI-assisted research is therefore evaluated as a loop that generates hypotheses, derives testable consequences, accepts independent adjudication, updates beliefs, and outputs only evidence-licensed claims.
Eric Nalisnick, Chi Zhang, Sophia Qian +1stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG
We study models for human-AI teaming through the lens of statistical calibration. We assume the team consists of an AI model and human -- both of which are calibrated with respect to some partitioning of the feature space -- and expose how the calibration assumptions propagate into the teaming framework. In particular, we consider frameworks that either (i) combine human and model predictions or (ii) delegate prediction responsibility to either a human or model. We show via theoretical and empirical results that existing methods for combination do not preserve the human's degree of calibration. Methods for delegation (by the very act of delegation) preserve calibration of the downstream predictors but shift the burden onto the rejector meta-model that decides who predicts. The rejector must be calibrated finely enough to locate where each member is superior, a demand that grows with the human's expertise and becomes unattainable when the human relies on information the system cannot observe.