How Do We Know AI Gets Human Thinking Wrong? — with Dr. Benjamin Paaßen

Host Iman Mossavat welcomes Dr. Benjamin Paaßen, Junior Professor for Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning at Bielefeld University and researcher at the Educational Technology Lab at DFKI. Together, they examine the growing debate around using large language models (LLMs) as substitutes for human participants in psychological and educational research. Dr. Paaßen shares why replacing human input with machine responses risks producing misleading results, especially when subtle linguistic shifts reveal critical differences between human and AI reasoning. He stresses that while LLMs can be useful in narrow, text-based tasks validated against large sets of human data, they cannot replicate the depth of human cognition. The discussion highlights the limits of AI in research settings, the dangers of overestimating machine intelligence, and the importance of maintaining rigorous standards when integrating these tools into scientific work.Radio 4 Brainport, Eindhoven