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Scientific American
9 hours ago
- Scientific American
I Gave My Personality to an AI agent. Here's What Happened Next
On a gray Sunday morning in March, I told an AI chatbot my life story. Introducing herself as Isabella, she spoke with a friendly female voice that would have been well-suited to a human therapist, were it not for its distinctly mechanical cadence. Aside from that, there wasn't anything humanlike about her; she appeared on my computer screen as a small virtual avatar, like a character from a 1990s video game. For nearly two hours Isabella collected my thoughts on everything from vaccines to emotional coping strategies to policing in the U.S. When the interview was over, a large language model (LLM) processed my responses to create a new artificial intelligence system designed to mimic my behaviors and beliefs—a kind of digital clone of my personality. A team of computer scientists from Stanford University, Google DeepMind and other institutions developed Isabella and the interview process in an effort to build more lifelike AI systems. Dubbed ' generative agents,' these systems can simulate the decision-making behavior of individual humans with impressive accuracy. Late last year Isabella interviewed more than 1,000 people. Then the volunteers and their generative agents took the General Social Survey, a biennial questionnaire that has cataloged American public opinion since 1972. Their results were, on average, 85 percent identical, suggesting that the agents can closely predict the attitudes and opinions of their human counterparts. Although the technology is in its infancy, it offers a glimmer of a future in which predictive algorithms can potentially act as online surrogates for each of us. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. When I first learned about generative agents the humanist in me rebelled, silently insisting that there was something about me that isn't reducible to the 1's and 0's of computer code. Then again, maybe I was naive. The rapid evolution of AI has brought many humbling surprises. Time and again, machines have outperformed us in skills we once believed to be unique to human intelligence—from playing chess to writing computer code to diagnosing cancer. Clearly AI can replicate the narrow, problem-solving part of our intellect. But how much of your personality—a mercurial phenomenon—is deterministic, a set of probabilities that are no more inscrutable to algorithms than the arrangement of pieces on a chessboard? The question is hotly debated. An encounter with my own generative agent, it seemed to me, could help me to get some answers. The LLMs behind generative agents and chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are certainly expert imitators. People have fed texts from deceased loved ones to ChatGPT, which could then conduct text conversations that closely approximated the departed's voices. Today developers are positioning agents as a more advanced form of chatbot, capable of autonomously making decisions and completing routine tasks, such as navigating a Web browser or debugging computer code. They're also marketing agents as productivity boosters, onto which businesses can offload time-intensive human drudgery. Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Perplexity and virtually every major tech player has jumped onboard the agent bandwagon. Joon Sung Park, a leader of Stanford's generative agent work, had always been drawn to what early Disney animators called 'the illusion of life.' He began his doctoral work at Stanford in late 2020, after the COVID pandemic was forcing much of the world into lockdown, and as generative AI was starting to boom. Three years earlier, Google researchers introduced the transformer, a type of neural network that can analyze and reproduce mathematical patterns in text. (The 'GPT' in ChatGPT stands for 'generative pretrained transformer.') Park knew that video game designers had long struggled to create lifelike characters that could do more than move mechanically and read from a script. He wondered: Could generative AI create authentically humanlike behavior in virtual characters? He unveiled generative agents in a 2023 conference paper in which he described them as 'interactive simulacra of human behavior.' They were built atop ChatGPT and integrated with an 'agent architecture,' a layer of code allowing them to remember information and formulate plans. The design simulates some key aspects of human perception and behavior, says Daniel Cervone, a professor of psychology specializing in personality theory at the University of Illinois Chicago. Generative agents are doing 'a big slice of what a real person does, which is to reflect on their experiences, abstract out beliefs about themselves, store those beliefs and use them as cognitive tools to interpret the world,' Cervone told me. 'That's what we do all the time.' Park dropped 25 generative agents inside Smallville, a virtual space modeled on Swarthmore College, where he had studied as an undergraduate. He included basic affordances such as a café and a bar where the agents could mingle; picture The Sims without a human player calling the shots. Smallville was a petri dish for virtual sociality; rather than watching cells multiply, Park observed the agents gradually coalescing from individual nodes into a unified network. At one point, Isabella (the same agent that would later interview me), assigned with the role of café owner, spontaneously began handing out invitations to her fellow agents for a Valentine's Day party. 'That starts to spark some real signals that this could actually work,' Park told me. Yet as encouraging as those early results were, the residents of Smallville had been programmed with particular personality traits. The real test, Park believed, would lie in building generative agents that could simulate the personalities of living humans. It was a tall order. Personality is a notoriously nebulous concept, fraught with hidden layers. The word itself is rooted in uncertainty, vagary, deception: it's derived from the Latin persona, which originally referred to a mask worn by a stage actor. Park and his team don't claim to have built perfect simulations of individuals' personalities. 'A two-hour interview doesn't [capture] you in anything near your entirety,' says Michael Bernstein, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and one of Park's collaborators. 'It does seem to be enough to gather a sense of your attitudes.'And they don't think generative agents are close to artificial general intelligence, or AGI—an as-yet-theoretical system that can match humans on any cognitive task. In their latest paper, Park and his colleagues argue that their agents could help researchers understand complex, real-world social phenomena, such as the spread of online misinformation and the outcome of national elections. If they can accurately simulate individuals, then they can theoretically set the simulations loose to interact with one another and see what kind of social behaviors emerge. Think Smallville on a much bigger scale. Yet, as I would soon discover, generative agents may only be able to imitate a very narrow and simplified slice of the human personality. Meeting my generative agent a week after my interview with Isabella felt like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror: I knew I was seeing my own reflection, but the image was warped and twisted. The first thing I noticed was that the agent—let's say 'he'—didn't speak like me. I was on a video call with Park, and the two of us were taking turns asking him questions. Unlike Isabella, he didn't come with his own avatar; he just appeared as faceless lines of green text spilling across my screen. We were testing his ability to make informed guesses about my life, filling in information I hadn't directly provided to Isabella. The results were somewhat disappointing. At one point, I asked him to tell me a secret about himself that no one else knows, hoping he would surface some kind of moderately deep insight. He said he loved astronomy. True enough but hardly revelatory. His real talent seemed to be inferring some of the more mundane details of my life. When asked if his family had dogs growing up, he correctly answered yes, even though I had only told Isabella that my sister and parents have dogs today. I had, however, described my childhood in Colorado, which was full of family camping trips in the mountains, and the agent had apparently correctly deduced that there was a high probability that somebody who grew up in such an environment also grew up with dogs. 'Those are the basic boundaries of this technology,' Park told me. 'In the absence of the ground-truth information, it will try to make its best guess.' At times those guesses were comically off the mark. When asked to recount an embarrassing moment from his past, he fabricated a story about a party in college in which he'd lost his balance while dancing and fell onto a table full of snacks. Thankfully, that never happened to the real me. Here, too, the system was connecting disparate bits of my personal data and doing its best to concoct something plausible. Toward the end of the Q&A, I ventured into the deep end by asking whether he believed in God. The answer wasn't far from how I might respond. 'I wasn't raised in a specific religious framework, but I've always felt a connection with something greater than myself, especially when I'm in nature,' my agent wrote. 'It's like there's a kind of transcendent energy or consciousness that we can tap into.' Most memorably, there were moments that felt like genuine insight. I had had a long, stressful few months. I had started working as a full-time freelance writer last October, ushering in a period of professional freedom but also chronic uncertainty. I'd spent much of the winter hunkered down, reading and writing, in my small New York City apartment, and I was feeling the psychological effects of prolonged isolation. Embracing the spirit of spring, I had resolved to make what I believed would be some healthy changes, starting with a greater effort to maintain a better work-life balance. I asked my generative agent, 'What's some advice you'd want to offer to your past self?' 'Embrace uncertainty a bit more,' he began. I had to pause. Already the response so closely echoed the themes I'd been articulating to myself in my journal the previous day, it was almost as if I were writing the agents' words myself. 'I think I spent a lot of time worrying about the future and trying to control every aspect of my life, and that often led to unnecessary stress,' he continued. 'I would advise myself to trust the process and be more open to the unexpected paths that life can take…. It's easy to get caught up in career ambitions, but nurturing relationships and taking time for oneself is equally important.' Despite those moments of pleasant surprise, my conversation with my generative agent left me feeling hollow. I felt I had met a two-dimensional version of myself—all artifice, no depth. It had captured a veneer of my personality, but it was just that: a virtual actor playing a role, wearing my data as a mask. At no point did I get the feeling that I was interacting with a system that truly captured my voice and my thoughts. But that isn't the point. Generative agents don't need to sound like you or understand you in your entirety to be useful, just as psychologists don't need to understand every quirk of your behavior to make broad-stroke diagnoses of your personality type. Adam Green, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University, who studies the impacts of AI on human creativity, believes that that lack of specificity and our growing reliance on a handful of powerful algorithms could filter out much of the color and quirks that make each of us unique. Even the most advanced algorithm will revert to the mean of the dataset on which it's been trained. 'That matters,' Green says, 'because ultimately what you'll have is homogenization.' In his view, the expanding ubiquity of predictive AI models is squeezing our culture into a kind of groupthink, in which all our idiosyncrasies slowly but surely become discounted as irrelevant outliers in the data of humanity. After meeting my generative agent, I remembered the feeling I had back when I spoke with Isabella—my inner voice that had rejected the idea that my personality could be re-created in silicon or, as Meghan O'Gieblyn put it in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, 'that the soul is little more than a data set.' I still felt that way. If anything, my conviction had been strengthened. I was also aware that I might be falling prey to the same kind of hubris that once kept early critics of AI from believing that computers could ever compose decent poetry or outmatch humans in chess. But I was willing to take that risk.
Calgary Herald
4 days ago
- Calgary Herald
Opinion: Why Calgary's streets feel less safe even as crime falls on paper
Article content Walk around almost any part of Calgary's downtown and you'll hear our city's unmistakable soundtrack: the rattle of foil, the hiss of a torch and drug dealers with their aggressive dogs selling poison to people both literally and figuratively bent in half by addiction. Nevertheless, the 2024 Crime Severity Index (CSI) shows Calgary's score dropped about 14 per cent — the lowest in a decade. Article content Article content Understandably, many Calgarians are left wondering how our downtown can resemble a zombie-apocalypse film set while Canada's crime barometer claims we are safer than before COVID. The answer lies in what the CSI measures — and more importantly, what it misses. Article content Article content Article content The CSI weights every police-reported offence by the average custodial sentence it attracts. A drop in homicides or sexual assaults lowers the score even when lesser crimes persist. Thanks largely to the hard work of Calgary's front-line officers and their partners, Calgary did record fewer homicides and sexual assaults in 2024. Article content The CSI captures only reported incidents. Anything unreported — open drug dealing, vandalism, anti-social behaviour, low-value theft, online fraud — never enters the data set, creating what criminologists call the 'dark figure of crime.' Statistics Canada's 2019 General Social Survey found that just 29 per cent of criminal incidents — and a meagre six per cent of sexual assaults — were formally reported to police, distorting the CSI's ability to mirror the reality of crime and disorder in our city. Article content Article content That darkness was glaring in 2024. Though the CSI score dropped, other data showed assaults increasing by roughly 15 per cent over the five-year average, robberies climbing seven per cent, and weapons offences surging by more than 30 per cent. Fraud — often online — was up eight per cent, and drug offences involving meth and fentanyl rose by around 10 per cent. In essence, fewer murders and reported sexual assaults pulled the index down, yet many street-level and cybercrime categories rose — exposing the limits of our city's CSI score. Article content There are several reasons that some crimes aren't included in the CSI score, including: Under-reporting. Posting a video to social media often replaces dialing 911. Police discretion. When officers are stretched thin, minor offences are often resolved informally. Crown screening. Overworked prosecutors may stay or divert 'minor' charges for pragmatic, not evidential, reasons.
UPI
26-06-2025
- Politics
- UPI
Why fewer Americans speak up on political issues
Studies show that both Republican and Democratic supporters are now far more likely than in the past to view the opposing party with deep distrust. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo June 26 (UPI) -- For decades, Americans' trust in one another has been on the decline, according to the most recent General Social Survey. A major factor in that downshift has been the concurrent rise in the polarization between the two major political parties. Supporters of Republicans and Democrats are far more likely than in the past to view the opposite side with distrust. That political polarization is so stark that many Americans are now unlikely to have friendly social interactions, live nearby or congregate with people from opposing camps, according to one recent study. Social scientists often refer to this sort of animosity as "affective polarization," meaning that people not only hold conflicting views on many or most political issues but also disdain fellow citizens who hold different opinions. Over the past few decades, such affective polarization in the U.S. has become commonplace. Polarization undermines democracy by making the essential processes of democratic deliberation -- discussion, negotiation, compromise and bargaining over public policies -- difficult, if not impossible. Because polarization extends so broadly and deeply, some people have become unwilling to express their views until they've confirmed they're speaking with someone who's like-minded. I'm a political scientist, and I found that Americans were far less likely to publicly voice their opinions than even during the height of the McCarthy-era Red Scare. The muting of the American voice According to a 2022 book written by political scientists Taylor Carlson and Jaime E. Settle, fears about speaking out are grounded in concerns about social sanctions for expressing unwelcome views. And this withholding of views extends across a broad range of social circumstances. In 2022, for instance, I conducted a survey of a representative sample of about 1,500 residents of the U.S. I found that while 45% of the respondents were worried about expressing their views to members of their immediate family, this percentage ballooned to 62% when it came to speaking out publicly in one's community. Nearly half of those surveyed said they felt less free to speak their minds than they used to. About three to four times more Americans said they did not feel free to express themselves, compared with the number of those who said so during the McCarthy era. Censorship in the U.S. and globally Since that survey, attacks on free speech have increased markedly, especially under the Trump administration. Issues such as the Israeli war in Gaza, activist campaigns against "wokeism," and the ever-increasing attempts to penalize people for expressing certain ideas have made it more difficult for people to speak out. The breadth of self-censorship in the U.S. in recent times is not unprecedented or unique to the U.S. Indeed, research in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere have reported similar increases in self-censorship in the past several years. How the 'spiral of a silence' explains self-censorship In the 1970s, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a distinguished German political scientist, coined the term the "spiral of silence" to describe how self-censorship arises and what its consequences can be. Informed by research she conducted on the 1965 West German federal election, Noelle-Neumann observed that an individual's willingness to publicly give their opinion was tied to their perceptions of public opinion on an issue. The so-called spiral happens when someone expresses a view on a controversial issue and then encounters vigorous criticism from an aggressive minority -- perhaps even sharp attacks. A listener can impose costs on the speaker for expressing the view in a number of ways, including criticism, direct personal attacks and even attempts to "cancel" the speaker through ending friendships or refusing to attend social events such as Thanksgiving or holiday dinners. This kind of sanction isn't limited to just social interactions but also when someone is threatened by far bigger institutions, from corporations to the government. The speaker learns from this encounter and decides to keep their mouth shut in the future because the costs of expressing the view are simply too high. This self-censorship has knock-on effects, as views become less commonly expressed and people are less likely to encounter support from those who hold similar views. People come to believe that they are in the minority, even if they are, in fact, in the majority. This belief then also contributes to the unwillingness to express one's views. The opinions of the aggressive minority then become dominant. True public opinion and expressed public opinion diverge. Most importantly, the free-ranging debate so necessary to democratic politics is stifled. Not all issues are like this, of course -- only issues for which a committed and determined minority exists that can impose costs on a particular viewpoint are subject to this spiral. The consequences for democratic deliberation The tendency toward self-censorship means listeners are deprived of hearing the withheld views. The marketplace of ideas becomes skewed; the choices of buyers in that marketplace are circumscribed. The robust debate so necessary to deliberations in a democracy is squelched as the views of a minority come to be seen as the only "acceptable" political views. No better example of this can be found than in the absence of debate in the contemporary U.S. about the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, whatever outcome such vigorous discussion might produce. Fearful of consequences, many people are withholding their views on Israel -- whether Israel has committed war crimes, for instance, or whether Israeli members of government should be sanctioned -- because they fear being branded as antisemitic. Many Americans are also biting their tongues when it comes to DEI, affirmative action and even whether political tolerance is essential for democracy. But the dominant views are also penalized by this spiral. By not having to face their competitors, they lose the opportunity to check their beliefs and, if confirmed, bolster and strengthen their arguments. Good ideas lose the chance to become better, while bad ideas -- such as something as extreme as Holocaust denial -- are given space to flourish. The spiral of silence therefore becomes inimical to pluralistic debate, discussion and, ultimately, to democracy itself. James L. Gibson is the Sidney W. Souers professor of government at the Washington University in St. Louis. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Scoop
24-06-2025
- General
- Scoop
1 In 10 Young Adults Are LGBTIQ+
The LGBTIQ+ population is comparatively young, with 1 in 10 people aged 15 to 29 years being LGBTIQ+ (10.2 percent) in the 2023 Census, compared with 1 in 20 adults in the overall adult population (4.9 percent), according to a report released by Stats NZ today. LGBTIQ+ population of Aotearoa New Zealand: 2023 brings together information about the LGBTIQ+ population in the 2023 Census, as well as information on the LGBT+ population from the Household Economic Survey and the General Social Survey. The 2023 Census data has enabled detailed breakdowns of the LGBTIQ+ population and the groups within it, across age, ethnicity, and other census measures for the first time. Gender, sex, and LGBTIQ+ concepts in the 2023 Census has more information on the census concepts used for these breakdowns.
Japan Today
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Japan Today
From defenders to skeptics: The sharp decline in young Americans' support for free speech
By Jacob Mchangama For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech's fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech. According to a March report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply in recent years. In 2021, 71% of young Americans said people should be allowed to insult the U.S. flag, which is a key indicator of support for free speech, no matter how distasteful. By 2024, that number had fallen to just 43% – a 28-point drop. Support for pro‑LGBTQ+ speech declined by 20 percentage points, and tolerance for speech that offends religious beliefs fell by 14 points. This drop contributed to the U.S. having the third-largest decline in free speech support among the 33 countries that The Future of Free Speech surveyed – behind only Japan and Israel. Why has this support diminished so dramatically? Shift from past generations In the 1960s, college students led what was called the free speech movement, demanding the right to speak freely about political matters on campus, often clashing with older, more censorious generations. Sociologist Jean Twenge has tracked changes in attitudes using data from the General Social Survey, a biennial survey conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. Since the 1970s, this survey has asked Americans whether controversial figures – racists, communists and anti-religionists – should be allowed to speak. Support for such rights generally increased from the Greatest Generation, born between 1900-1924, to Gen X, born between 1965-1979. But Gen Z, those born between 1995-2004, has reversed that trend. Despite the fact that the Cold War, which pitted the communist Soviet Union and its allies against the democratic West, ended more than three decades ago, even support for the free speech rights of communists has declined. Political drift and cultural realignment At the same time, some data suggests that young Americans may be drifting rightward politically. A Harvard Institute of Politics poll in late 2024 found that men ages 18–24 now identify as slightly more conservative than those ages 25–29. Another Gallup survey showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely as millennials to describe themselves as more conservative than their parents were at the same age. This shift may help explain changes in speech attitudes. Today's young Americans may be less likely to instinctively defend speech aligned with liberal or progressive causes. For example, support among 18- to 29-year-olds for same-sex marriage, generally considered a liberal or progressive cause, fell from 79% in 2018 to 71% in 2022, according to Pew Research. Attitudes toward hate speech The Future of Free Speech study found that younger Americans are especially hesitant to defend speech that offends minority groups. Only 47% of those ages 18 to 34 said such speech should be allowed, compared with 70% of those over 55. Similarly, tolerance for religiously offensive speech was 57% among younger respondents, down from 71% in 2021. This concern over harmful or bigoted speech is not new. A 2015 Pew survey found that 40% of millennials believed the government should be able to prevent offensive speech about minorities. More recently, a 2024 report by the nonpartisan free speech advocacy group FIRE found that 70% of U.S. college students supported disinviting speakers perceived as bigoted. Over a quarter said violence could be acceptable to stop campus speech in some cases. Broader implications Why does this matter? The First Amendment protects unpopular speech. It does not just shield offensive ideas, but it safeguards movements that once seemed fringe. Whether it's civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights or anti-war protests, history shows that ideas seen as dangerous or radical in one era often become widely accepted in another. Today's younger Americans will soon shape policies in universities, media, government, tech and the public square. If a growing share believes speech should be regulated to prevent offense, that could signal a shift in how free speech is interpreted and enforced in American institutions. To be sure, support for free speech in principle remains strong. The Future of Free Speech report found that 89% of Americans said people should be allowed to criticize government policy. But tolerance for more provocative or offensive speech appears to be eroding, especially among young people. This raises questions about whether these changes reflect a life-stage effect − will today's young people become more speech-tolerant as they age? Or are we seeing a deeper generational shift? The data suggests Americans across all generations still value free speech. But for younger Americans, especially, that support seems increasingly conditional. Jacob Mchangama is Research Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, Vanderbilt University. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. External Link © The Conversation
