Samuel Kruger, associate professor of finance; John Griffin, James A. Elkins Centennial Chair in Finance; and doctoral student Prateek Mahajan found that fraud in government-funded pandemic loans explained 22.5% of the average increase in housing prices during 2020 and 2021.

In new research, Yan Leng, assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, has devised a sort of personality test — more precisely, a behavioral audit — for large language models (LLMs), the technology that drives products such as ChatGPT.

By understanding an LLM’s existing tendencies, an organization can decide whether an available model already fits its values and usage scenarios. If not, it might need to fine-tune a model before putting it to use.

Leng compares her framework to trying to understand a person through their actions and thought processes. “For a human, we would have our values, and our values would dictate how we make decisions, so we try to have that for LLMs as well,” she says.

A new study, co-authored by a Penn State Smeal College of Business professor, shows that AI can mass-produce academic papers that look nearly indistinguishable from human-authored research, raising concerns about the potential impact on the academic community.