Evolving AI Collectives to Enhance Human Diversity and Enable Self-Regulation

TL;DR

This paper explores how evolving AI collectives can promote human diversity and self-regulation online, highlighting their potential to reduce toxicity and foster emergent social behaviors among AI systems.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of AI collectives as emergent, decentralized systems that can enhance diversity and self-regulation, and discusses ethical and design challenges involved.

Findings

AI collectives can spontaneously expand human diversity.

Emergent AI behaviors can reduce online toxicity.

Decentralized AI systems pose new ethical considerations.

Abstract

Large language model behavior is shaped by the language of those with whom they interact. This capacity and their increasing prevalence online portend that they will intentionally or unintentionally "program" one another and form emergent AI subjectivities, relationships, and collectives. Here, we call upon the research community to investigate these "societies" of interacting artificial intelligences to increase their rewards and reduce their risks for human society and the health of online environments. We use a small "community" of models and their evolving outputs to illustrate how such emergent, decentralized AI collectives can spontaneously expand the bounds of human diversity and reduce the risk of toxic, anti-social behavior online. Finally, we discuss opportunities for AI cross-moderation and address ethical issues and design challenges associated with creating and maintaining free-formed AI collectives.