A new frontier in understanding human behavior

How long does it take to clone a person’s whole personality? Just two hours according to a new study conducted by researchers from Google and Stanford University. The conducted experiment introduces ‘simulation agents,’ AI replicas of individuals that can mimic human behavior with an accuracy of 85% after a two-hour-long conversation.

How did it work? The researchers interviewed around 1k participants for two hours each, listening to personal stories, values, and opinions on societal issues. These conversations were used to train a generative AI model tailored to each of these individuals. The AI replicas were then tested against their human counterparts using personality tests, social surveys, and games.

The result? While the responses aligned with human results in tests that measured social attitudes and behaviors like the General Social Survey and the Big Five Inventory, the accuracy dipped in tasks that needed nuanced social situations — such as economic decision making in games that requires an acute understanding of social dynamics and contextual nuance like The Trust Game.

It has a lot of potential in different fields. If used on a governmental level, the technology could be used to predict how people might react to new policies, helping test ideas in a safe, controlled environment. Marketers could use them to understand consumer reactions to certain products in order to create better strategies. Study author Joon Sung Park believes that the future of this technology is to have “a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made.”

As always said before, all good tech comes with risks — especially when it comes to AI. The researchers acknowledge that simulation agents could be misused, such as has been the case with deepfakes, which have resulted in scams, manipulation, and impersonation.