Simulating Human Behavior with AI Agents


Brief by The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI): “…we introduce an AI agent architecture that simulates more than 1,000 real people. The agent architecture—built by combining the transcripts of two-hour, qualitative interviews with a large language model (LLM) and scored against social science benchmarks—successfully replicated real individuals’ responses to survey questions 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers across surveys staggered two weeks apart. The generative agents performed comparably in predicting people’s personality traits and experiment outcomes and were less biased than previously used simulation tools.

This architecture underscores the benefits of using generative agents as a research tool to glean new insights into real-world individual behavior. However, researchers and policymakers must also mitigate the risks of using generative agents in such contexts, including harms related to over-reliance on agents, privacy, and reputation…(More)”.