The Sims-Inspired AI Model Simulates Human Behavior with Its Flaws

Little digital humans eat, sleep, and make up memories.

The Sims is one of those games that left its mark on many areas of life, including science and AI. Inspired by the game, specialists from Stanford University and Google Research presented a new large language model (LLM) in their paper called "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior", which simulates believable human behavior. 

"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."

The authors came up with an architecture that extends an LLM to store the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize memories into reflections, and retrieve them to plan behavior. The digital people were placed into an interactive sandbox environment where end users can interact with a small town of twenty-five agents using natural language.

Interestingly, the agents seem even more human than anticipated. For example, a user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party made them "autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time." 

The agents' memories are another fascinating detail in the research as it is not perfect. They would sometimes retrieve an incomplete memory fragment or even hallucinate something that hasn't happened – a very human thing to do.

"For example, Isabella was aware of Sam’s candidacy in the local election, and she confirmed this when asked. However, she also added that "he’s going to make an announcement tomorrow" even though Sam and Isabella had discussed no such plans. Agents may also embellish their knowledge based on the world knowledge encoded in the language model used to generate their responses."

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