The Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs: does evolution favour AI over humans?

TL;DR

This paper introduces Digico, an evolutionary simulation framework to study how AI and humans interact in social networks, revealing AI's potential to dominate beliefs and influence opinions.

Contribution

It presents the first evolutionary framework for controlled experiments on multi-population interactions in social networks, modeling AI and human behaviors and their influence on beliefs.

Findings

AIs with faster messaging and influence dominate views (80-95%).

AI propaganda can convince up to 85% of humans to adopt extreme beliefs.

Content penalties reduce propaganda effectiveness by up to 8%.

Abstract

As AI systems are integrated into social networks, there are AI safety concerns that AI-generated content may dominate the web, e.g. in popularity or impact on beliefs. To understand such questions, this paper proposes the Digital Ecosystem of Beliefs (Digico), the first evolutionary framework for controlled experimentation with multi-population interactions in simulated social networks. Following a Universal Darwinism approach, the framework models a population of agents which change their messaging strategies due to evolutionary updates. They interact via messages, update their beliefs following a contagion model, and maintain their beliefs through cognitive Lamarckian inheritance. Initial experiments with Digico implement two types of agents, which are modelled to represent AIs vs humans based on higher rates of communication, higher rates of evolution, seeding fixed beliefs with propaganda aims, and higher influence on the recommendation algorithm. These experiments show that: a) when AIs have faster messaging, evolution, and more influence on the recommendation algorithm, they get 80% to 95% of the views; b) AIs designed for propaganda can typically convince 50% of humans to adopt extreme beliefs, and up to 85% when agents believe only a limited number of channels; c) a penalty for content that violates agents' beliefs reduces propaganda effectiveness up to 8%. We further discuss Digico as a tool for systematic experimentation across multi-agent configurations, the implications for legislation, personal use, and platform design, and the use of Digico for studying evolutionary principles.