Swell.
This follows on last week's news that "Some AI Is Showing Signs Of Self-Preservation And Power-Seeking Behaviour".
From Interesting Engineering, May 17:
A classic framework was adapted for studying social conventions in humans.
Researchers have revealed that the LLM AI models can spontaneously develop shared social conventions through interaction alone. They claimed that when these agents communicate in groups, they do not just follow scripts or repeat patterns, but self-organise, reaching consensus on linguistic norms much like human communities.
LLMs are powerful deep learning algorithms that can understand and generate human language, with the most famous to date being ChatGPT.A research team from City St George’s, University of London, and the IT University of Copenhagen highlighted that these LLMs do not just follow scripts or repeat patterns when communicating in groups.
Interacting agents
“Most research so far has treated LLMs in isolation,” said lead author Ariel Flint Ashery, a doctoral researcher at City St George’s.
“But real-world AI systems will increasingly involve many interacting agents. 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?”
A classic framework was adapted for studying social conventions in humans, based on the “naming game” model of convention formation.Published in Science Advances, researchers’ experimental results demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of universally adopted social conventions in decentralized populations of large language model (LLM) agents....
....MUCH MORE
If they are going to get all social on us it's probably a good idea to re-read MacKay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds":
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds,while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
To see if we can get out in front of these things while there is still time.
Maybe Gustave Le Bon as well.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
