An AI Terrarium for understanding intermediated and personal communication

The immediacy, reach and virality of contemporary communication technologies present an enormous societal opportunity and an escalating threat. Research efforts to understand these phenomena face significant challenges: field studies are complex to design, expensive to conduct, and raise concerns about user manipulation.

This research project leverages AI to power more realistic simulated personas that can interact via natural language and are tuned to update their beliefs in ways that mimic real human participants — an AI Terrarium. The AI agents will be engineered and fine-tuned to capture patterns of real communication and belief change observed in representative human populations collected using panel surveys and behavioral experiments. The behaviors of interacting “digital twins” – AI models matched to human participants in the survey and experimental collections–will then be used to simulate and understand patterns of communication and persuasion in the real world.

Once developed, the AI Terrarium will enable low-cost testing of different message campaigns, news feeds, or interaction rules. Promising strategies will be validated in carefully controlled experiments using lab-based networked messaging platforms. The ability to simulate social media interactions with human fidelity would permit rapid-cycle testing of intervention strategies on a variety of health and political issues, ranging from vaccine skepticism to electoral misinformation, and allow piloting prior to costly real-world trials.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Timothy Rogers, professor of psychology

CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS

Robert Hawkins, assistant professor of psychology

Dhavan Shah, professor of journalism

Sijia Yang, assistant professor of journalism

Jerry Zhu, professor of computer science