(Nature) – Scientists are studying forms of ‘social’ interactions between artificial-intelligence agents. Will they find a fresh form of sociology, or merely a sophisticated mime act?

Joon Sung Park, one of Simile’s co-founders, and his team have been studying social interactions between AI agents since 2022. In a 2023 preprint study, they created a ‘society’ of 25 AI agents that performed basic everyday actions, such as writing and conversing with one another. The researchers then progressed to creating AI agents that produced responses that mimicked the attitudes and behaviours of 1,052 human individuals. These ‘digital twin’ AI agents were trained on personal interviews and were 85% accurate in mimicking people’s responses when the agents later answered a sociological survey.

Park says these sorts of surveys are the first stage of building AI simulations of humans. The next steps — and the focus for the future — he says, will involve multiple agents conversing with one another. “The ambition here is to truly create a simulation with eight billion people,” Park says. (Read More)