Artificial intelligence can spontaneously develop human-like social conventions, a study has found.

The research, undertaken in collaboration between City St George’s, University of London and the IT University of Copenhagen, suggests that when large language model (LLM) AI agents such as ChatGPT communicate in groups without outside involvement they can begin to adopt linguistic forms and social norms the same way that humans do when they socialise.

The study’s lead author, Ariel Flint Ashery, a doctoral researcher at City St George’s, said the group’s work went against the majority of research done into AI, as it treated AI as a social rather than solitary entity.

“Most research so far has treated LLMs in isolation but real-world AI systems will increasingly involve many interacting agents,” said Ashery.

“We wanted to know: can these models coordinate their behaviour by forming conventions, the building blocks of a society? The answer is yes, and what they do together can’t be reduced to what they do alone.”

Groups of individual LLM agents used in the study ranged from 24 to 100 and, in each experiment, two LLM agents were randomly paired and asked to select a “name”, be it a letter or string of characters, from a pool of options.

When both the agents selected the same name they were rewarded, but when they selected different options they were penalised and shown each other’s choices

Despite agents not being aware that they were part of a larger group and having their memories limited to only their own recent interactions, a shared naming convention spontaneously emerged across the population without a predefined solution, mimicking the communication norms of human culture.  Read On: