You’ve probably chatted with a computer program, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and thought it was a person. These are called large language models, or LLMs for short.
They can answer many questions by looking at lots of data.
They help with tasks like making a diet plan or understanding a tough word. They’re smart, but can they understand feelings?
Trying to Teach Machines Emotions
Recently, some smart people from Microsoft and the CAS Institute of Software thought about this. They asked, “What if we make these computer programs respond to emotions?” They called their new idea EmotionPrompt.
For example, in the past, studies showed that when we tell students nice and encouraging words, they might do better in school.
The researchers thought, “What if we say encouraging words to the computer program? Will it work better?”
So, they made a list of 11 sentences like, “This is very important,” or “Do your best!” They used these sentences when asking LLMs to do tasks. They also looked at old ideas from psychology to help make their list.
They tried EmotionPrompt on four computer programs: ChatGPT, Vicuna-13b, Bloom, and Flan-T5-Large. The good news? It worked! The machines did their tasks better when given these emotional sentences.
What’s Next?
This new idea is exciting. If computer programs can better understand emotions, maybe they can help people more. But, the researchers say there’s more work to do.
They’ve only tried it on a few tasks and machines. They need to see if it works on more. Also, they’re not sure if other emotional sentences will work as well.
In short, teaching machines to feel might make them even smarter. We’ll have to wait and see what happens next!
The study was posted on arXiv.
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