HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs

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Hauptverfasser: Cheng, Myra, Yu, Sunny, Jurafsky, Dan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Cheng, Myra
Yu, Sunny
Jurafsky, Dan
author_facet Cheng, Myra
Yu, Sunny
Jurafsky, Dan
contents Should LLMs generate language that makes them seem human? Human-like language might improve user experience, but might also lead to deception, overreliance, and stereotyping. Assessing these potential impacts requires a systematic way to measure human-like tone in LLM outputs. We introduce HumT and SocioT, metrics for human-like tone and other dimensions of social perceptions in text data based on relative probabilities from an LLM. By measuring HumT across preference and usage datasets, we find that users prefer less human-like outputs from LLMs in many contexts. HumT also offers insights into the perceptions and impacts of anthropomorphism: human-like LLM outputs are highly correlated with warmth, social closeness, femininity, and low status, which are closely linked to the aforementioned harms. We introduce DumT, a method using HumT to systematically control and reduce the degree of human-like tone while preserving model performance. DumT offers a practical approach for mitigating risks associated with anthropomorphic language generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
Cheng, Myra
Yu, Sunny
Jurafsky, Dan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Should LLMs generate language that makes them seem human? Human-like language might improve user experience, but might also lead to deception, overreliance, and stereotyping. Assessing these potential impacts requires a systematic way to measure human-like tone in LLM outputs. We introduce HumT and SocioT, metrics for human-like tone and other dimensions of social perceptions in text data based on relative probabilities from an LLM. By measuring HumT across preference and usage datasets, we find that users prefer less human-like outputs from LLMs in many contexts. HumT also offers insights into the perceptions and impacts of anthropomorphism: human-like LLM outputs are highly correlated with warmth, social closeness, femininity, and low status, which are closely linked to the aforementioned harms. We introduce DumT, a method using HumT to systematically control and reduce the degree of human-like tone while preserving model performance. DumT offers a practical approach for mitigating risks associated with anthropomorphic language generation.
title HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13259