(Wired) – Meta’s AI characters users might seem useless, but fake social media users can sometimes offer valuable insights into real human behavior.

Let’s pause from hating on Meta for a moment though. It’s worth noting that AI-generated social personas can also be a valuable research tool for scientists looking to explore how AI can mimic human behavior.

An experiment called GovSim, run in late 2024, illustrates how useful it can be to study how AI characters interact with one another. The researchers behind the project wanted to explore the phenomenon of collaboration between humans with access to a shared resource such as shared land for grazing livestock. (Read More)