IC-762GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 outperform humans in generation but underperform in discriminative (selective) evaluation across 10 of 13 language tasks

Peter West, Ximing Lu, Nouha Dziri, Faeze Brahman, Linjie Li, Jena D. Hwang, Liwei Jiang, Jillian Fisher, Abhilasha Ravichander, Khyathi Chandu, Benjamin Newman, Pang Wei Koh, Allyson Ettinger, Yejin Choi

SourceThe Generative AI Paradox: “What It Can Create, It May Not Understand”

The paper evaluates GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 in both a generative setting (produce a response) and a discriminative setting (select the correct response from candidates) across 13 language benchmarks. In 10 of 13 datasets, at least one model outperforms humans in generation while underperforming in discrimination; in 7 of 13, both models show this pattern. The gap widens with task difficulty: on XSum, GPT-4 drops from 100% accuracy with easy negatives to 19% with hard negatives, while humans maintain consistently high accuracy.

Evidence
correlational
Key metric
for 10 of the 13 datasets, sub-hypothesis 1 is supported in at least one model; for 7 of the 13 datasets, supported in both models; in the xsum task, gpt4 achieves 100% accuracy when selecting the correct answer from easy negatives, but this drops to 19% when confronted with hard negatives
Caveat
Dataset/benchmark contamination is a potential limitation with proprietary models; the authors note this should affect generation and discriminative evaluation similarly. The study focuses on a small set of the most popular models.
Model
GPT-4 / ChatGPT4 / GPT-4 Code Interpreter / GPT-4 Technical Report, GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT-3.5
Concepts
Failure mode
Datasets
XSum [eval], FaithDial [eval], DREAM [eval], MUTUAL [eval], ToPIoQA [eval], RACE [eval], CommonsenseQA [eval], Social IQA [eval], HellaSwag [eval], PIQA [eval], Abductive NLI / Abductive NLG [eval], WanNLI [eval]
Methods
Zero-shot prompting [primary]
Related work
Dziri et al. 2023 (Faith and Fate) [context], Bubeck et al. 2023 (Sparks of AGI) [context]
Related findings
IC-763, IC-764, IC-765
Extraction
automatic-extraction