Meta caused a stir last week when it let slip that it intends to populate its platform with a significant number of entirely artificial users in the not too distant future. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta, told The Financial Times. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform ... that's where we see all of this going." The fact that Meta seems happy to fill its platform with AI slop and accelerate the "enshittification" of the internet as we know it is concerning. Some people then noticed that Facebook was in fact already awash with strange AI-generated individuals, most of which stopped posting a while ago.

In January, 1999, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had issued a memo on its intranet with the subject "Furby Alert." According to the Post, the memo decreed that employees were prohibited from bringing to work any recording devices, including "toys, such as'Furbys,' with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound." That holiday season, the Furby, an animatronic toy resembling a small owl, had been a retail sensation; nearly two million were sold by year's end. They were now banned from N.S.A. headquarters. A worry, according to one source for the Post, was that the toy might "start talking classified." Tiger Electronics, the makers of the Furby, was perplexed.

A group of researchers at Stanford University and Google have created a miniature RPG-style virtual world similar to The Sims, where 25 characters, controlled by ChatGPT and custom code, live out their lives independently with a high degree of realistic behavior. They wrote about their experiment in a preprint academic paper released on Friday. "Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day," write the researchers in their paper, "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior." To pull this off, the researchers relied heavily on a large language model (LLM) for social interaction, specifically the ChatGPT API. In addition, they created an architecture that simulates minds with memories and experiences, then let the agents loose in the world to interact.

A team of researchers from Google and Stanford University recently conducted an intriguing experiment, wherein they created a virtual town for 25 AI "agents" to inhabit. The study, titled "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior," aimed to explore the extent to which AI could mimic human behavior in a simulated environment, inspired by life-simulation games like The Sims. The researchers developed a town named "Smallville," populated it with ChatGPT-trained generative agents, and observed how they went about their day-to-day activities. A bird's-eye view of Smallville, which consists of houses, a park, a bar, a shopping center, a pharmacy and a college. The agents exhibited a remarkable degree of human-like behavior, with the ability to make inferences, store information in memory, and then behave accordingly.