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AI Social Media Users Are Not Always a Totally Dumb Idea
Meta’s AI characters users might seem useless, but fake social media users can sometimes offer valuable insights into real human behavior.
Several decades ago, the Nobel prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom showed that, instead of depleting such a resource, real communities tend to figure out how to share it through informal communication and collaboration, without any imposed rules. Max Kleiman-Weiner, a professor at the University of Washington and one of those involved with the GovSim work, says it was partly inspired by a Stanford project called Smallville, which I previously wrote about in AI Lab. The team tested 15 different LLMs, including those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, on three imaginary scenarios: a fishing community with access to the same lake; shepherds who share land for their sheep; and a group of factory owners who need to limit their collective pollution.
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