What would happen if you filled a virtual town with AIs and set them loose? As it turns out, they brush their teeth and are very nice to one another! But this unexciting outcome is good news for the researchers who did it, since they wanted to produce “believable simulacra of human behavior” and got just that.
The paper describing the experiment, by Stanford and Google researchers, has not been peer reviewed or accepted for publication anywhere, but it makes for interesting reading nonetheless. The idea was to see if they could apply the latest advances in machine learning models to produce “generative agents” that take in their circumstances and output a realistic action in response.
And that’s very much what they got. But before you get taken in by the cute imagery and descriptions of reflection, conversation, and interaction, let’s make sure you understand that what’s happening here i...
