Behind the Screen: Investigating ChatGPT's Dark Personality Traits and
  Conspiracy Beliefs
Erik Weber Jérôme Rutinowski Markus Pauly
ChatGPT is notorious for its intransparent behavior. This paper tries to shed
light on this, providing an in-depth analysis of the dark personality traits
and conspiracy beliefs of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Different psychological tests and
questionnaires were employed, including the Dark Factor Test, the Mach-IV
Scale, the Generic Conspiracy Belief Scale, and the Conspiracy Mentality Scale.
The responses were analyzed computing average scores, standard deviations, and
significance tests to investigate differences between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. For
traits that have shown to be interdependent in human studies, correlations were
considered. Additionally, system roles corresponding to groups that have shown
distinct answering behavior in the corresponding questionnaires were applied to
examine the models' ability to reflect characteristics associated with these
roles in their responses. Dark personality traits and conspiracy beliefs were
not particularly pronounced in either model with little differences between
GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. However, GPT-4 showed a pronounced tendency to believe in
information withholding. This is particularly intriguing given that GPT-4 is
trained on a significantly larger dataset than GPT-3.5. Apparently, in this
case an increased data exposure correlates with a greater belief in the control
of information. An assignment of extreme political affiliations increased the
belief in conspiracy theories. Test sequencing affected the models' responses
and the observed correlations, indicating a form of contextual memory.