# Making AI chatbots helpful weakens their ability to simulate human behavior, large-scale study finds

> Source: <https://the-decoder.com/making-ai-chatbots-helpful-weakens-their-ability-to-simulate-human-behavior-large-scale-study-finds/>
> Published: 2026-05-30 12:44:12+00:00

A large-scale study covering 208,000 participants and 26 million responses shows that the very training that turns language models into helpful chatbots weakens their ability to replicate human behavior. The effect gets worse with each new model generation. Even the popular persona trick, feeding models demographic profiles, brings practically no benefit for individual predictions.

The article [Making AI chatbots helpful weakens their ability to simulate human behavior, large-scale study finds](https://the-decoder.com/making-ai-chatbots-helpful-weakens-their-ability-to-simulate-human-behavior-large-scale-study-finds/) appeared first on [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com).