The Third Ambition: Artificial Intelligence and the Science of Human Behavior
Contemporary artificial intelligence research has been organized around two dominant ambitions: productivity, which treats AI systems as tools for accelerating work and economic output, and alignment, which focuses on ensuring that increasingly capable systems behave safely and in accordance with human values. This paper articulates and develops a third, emerging ambition: the use of large language models (LLMs) as scientific instruments for studying human behavior, culture, and moral reasoning. Trained on unprecedented volumes of human-produced text, LLMs encode large-scale regularities in how people argue, justify, narrate, and negotiate norms across social domains. We argue that these ...
| Authors | W. Russell Neuman, Chad Coleman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 7 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 March 2026 |
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