Text understanding in GPT-4 vs humans

We examine whether a leading AI system GPT-4 understands text as well as humans do, first using a well-established standardized test of discourse comprehension. On this test, GPT-4 performs slightly, but not statistically significantly, better than humans given the very high level of human performance. Both GPT-4 and humans make correct inferences about information that is not explicitly stated in the text, a critical test of understanding. Next, we use more difficult passages to determine whether that could allow larger differences between GPT-4 and humans. GPT-4 does considerably better on this more difficult text than do the high school and university students for whom these passages are designed, as admission tests of student reading comprehension. Deeper exploration of GPT-4’s performance on material from one of these admission tests reveals generally accepted signatures of genuine understanding, namely generalization and inference., The dataset is comprised of text responses from GPT-4 after reading passages of text. It is scored and organized in folders. , , # Stored data from GPT-4

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jq2bvq8jk(opens in new window)](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jq2bvq8jk)

The top-level folder holds two subfolders, Section 2 and Section 3, referring to sections of the results in the manuscript. 

## Description of the data and file structure

### section 2

The Section 2 folder has 2 subfolders, one (`discourse comprehension data main expt`) dealing with an experiment wherein GPT-4 reads 11 stories from the Discourse Comprehension Test and responds with textual answers to 8 yes/no questions per story. This subfolder contains a Word document for each of the 11 stories which includes the prompt and questions given to GPT-4, the question types and correct answers, and the answers given by GPT-4. There is also a Word document describing abbreviations (`Abbreviations in the score correct file of section 2 data`) used in the scoring of the responses and another file describing the scoring (`score correct.xlsx`).

The second subfolde...,