AIs sure can do a lot – summarize a text, remove a picture’s background, create a travel itinerary, so on and so forth, but can they generate psychological tests? Yes – at least according to a recent paper co-lead authored by Dr. Friedrich Götz and Dr. Rakoen Martens.
In this paper*, researchers first developed the Psychometric Item Generator (PIG), before comparing fully AI-generated personality scales against the field’s existing gold standard measures. They found that the AI-generated questionnaires performed equally or better than the traditional, manually created scales in measuring Big Five personality traits.
Additionally, the paper has an Altmetric score of 100 – a rare and impressive feat for a methods paper. This score places it in the top 5% of all research outputs, and also makes it the 3rd highest-scoring output ever published in Psychological Methods.
*Götz, F. M.*, Maertens*, R., Loomba, S., & van der Linden, S. (2023). Let the algorithm speak: How to use neural networks for automatic item generation in psychological scale development. Psychological Methods. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000540