We conduct an incentivized laboratory experiment to study people's perception of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) alignment in the context of economic decision-making. Using a panel of economic problems spanning the domains of risk, time preference, social preference, and strategic interactions, we ask human subjects to make choices for themselves and to predict the choices made by GenAI on behalf of a human user. We find that people overestimate the degree of alignment between GenAI and human choices. In every problem, human subjects' average prediction about GenAI's choice is substantially closer to the average human-subject choice than it is to the GenAI choice. At the individual level, different subjects' predictions about GenAI's choice in a given problem are highly correlated with their own choices in the same problem. We explore the implications of people overestimating GenAI alignment in a simple theoretical model.

翻译：我们通过一项带有经济激励的实验室实验，研究人们在经济决策情境下对生成式人工智能（GenAI）对齐程度的认知。利用涵盖风险、时间偏好、社会偏好及战略互动领域的多组经济问题，我们要求人类受试者做出个人选择，并预测GenAI在代表人类用户时的选择。结果发现，人们普遍高估了GenAI与人类选择之间的对齐程度。在每个问题中，人类受试者对GenAI选择的平均预测值都更接近人类受试者的平均选择值，而非GenAI的实际选择值。在个体层面，不同受试者对同一问题中GenAI选择的预测与其自身在该问题上的选择高度相关。我们通过一个简单理论模型探讨了人们高估GenAI对齐程度的潜在影响。