AI for social science and social science of AI: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how AI, especially large language models, is transforming social science research and how social science perspectives are analyzing AI as social entities, highlighting recent progress and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive framework distinguishing AI for social science from social science of AI, and summarizes experimental platforms to support research in both areas.

Findings

Large language models enable new social science research methods.

AI is increasingly viewed as a social entity with human-like capabilities.

The survey highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in AI and social science.

Abstract

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have sparked a rethinking of artificial general intelligence possibilities. The increasing human-like capabilities of AI are also attracting attention in social science research, leading to various studies exploring the combination of these two fields. In this survey, we systematically categorize previous explorations in the combination of AI and social science into two directions that share common technical approaches but differ in their research objectives. The first direction is focused on AI for social science, where AI is utilized as a powerful tool to enhance various stages of social science research. While the second direction is the social science of AI, which examines AI agents as social entities with their human-like cognitive and linguistic capabilities. By conducting a thorough review, particularly on the substantial progress facilitated by recent advancements in large language models, this paper introduces a fresh perspective to reassess the relationship between AI and social science, provides a cohesive framework that allows researchers to understand the distinctions and connections between AI for social science and social science of AI, and also summarized state-of-art experiment simulation platforms to facilitate research in these two directions. We believe that as AI technology continues to advance and intelligent agents find increasing applications in our daily lives, the significance of the combination of AI and social science will become even more prominent.