The Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs: does evolution favour AI over humans?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bossens, David M., Feng, Shanshan, Ong, Yew-Soon
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Bossens, David M.
Feng, Shanshan
Ong, Yew-Soon
author_facet Bossens, David M.
Feng, Shanshan
Ong, Yew-Soon
contents As AI systems are integrated into social networks, there are AI safety concerns that AI-generated content may dominate the web, e.g. in popularity or impact on beliefs. To understand such questions, this paper proposes the Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs (Digico), the first evolutionary framework for controlled experimentation with multi-population interactions in simulated social networks. Following a Universal Darwinism approach, the framework models a population of agents which change their messaging strategies due to evolutionary updates. They interact via messages, update their beliefs following a contagion model, and maintain their beliefs through cognitive Lamarckian inheritance. Initial experiments with Digico implement two types of agents, which are modelled to represent AIs vs humans based on higher rates of communication, higher rates of evolution, seeding fixed beliefs with propaganda aims, and higher influence on the recommendation algorithm. These experiments show that: a) when AIs have faster messaging, evolution, and more influence on the recommendation algorithm, they get 80% to 95% of the views; b) AIs designed for propaganda can typically convince 50% of humans to adopt extreme beliefs, and up to 85% when agents believe only a limited number of channels; c) a penalty for content that violates agents' beliefs reduces propaganda effectiveness up to 8%. We further discuss Digico as a tool for systematic experimentation across multi-agent configurations, the implications for legislation, personal use, and platform design, and the use of Digico for studying evolutionary principles.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_14500
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs: does evolution favour AI over humans?
Bossens, David M.
Feng, Shanshan
Ong, Yew-Soon
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
As AI systems are integrated into social networks, there are AI safety concerns that AI-generated content may dominate the web, e.g. in popularity or impact on beliefs. To understand such questions, this paper proposes the Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs (Digico), the first evolutionary framework for controlled experimentation with multi-population interactions in simulated social networks. Following a Universal Darwinism approach, the framework models a population of agents which change their messaging strategies due to evolutionary updates. They interact via messages, update their beliefs following a contagion model, and maintain their beliefs through cognitive Lamarckian inheritance. Initial experiments with Digico implement two types of agents, which are modelled to represent AIs vs humans based on higher rates of communication, higher rates of evolution, seeding fixed beliefs with propaganda aims, and higher influence on the recommendation algorithm. These experiments show that: a) when AIs have faster messaging, evolution, and more influence on the recommendation algorithm, they get 80% to 95% of the views; b) AIs designed for propaganda can typically convince 50% of humans to adopt extreme beliefs, and up to 85% when agents believe only a limited number of channels; c) a penalty for content that violates agents' beliefs reduces propaganda effectiveness up to 8%. We further discuss Digico as a tool for systematic experimentation across multi-agent configurations, the implications for legislation, personal use, and platform design, and the use of Digico for studying evolutionary principles.
title The Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs: does evolution favour AI over humans?
topic Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14500