How AI Aggregation Affects Knowledge

TL;DR

This paper models how AI aggregation influences social learning, revealing that slow updates and local architectures can improve learning, while rapid updates and global aggregators may hinder it.

Contribution

It extends the DeGroot model to include AI aggregators, analyzing their impact on social learning and identifying conditions for effective aggregation strategies.

Findings

Slow updating of AI aggregators enhances learning across environments.

Local aggregators trained on specific data improve learning universally.

Global aggregators can worsen learning in some scenarios.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) changes social learning when aggregated outputs become training data for future predictions. To study this, we extend the DeGroot model by introducing an AI aggregator that trains on population beliefs and feeds synthesized signals back to agents. We define the learning gap as the deviation of long-run beliefs from the efficient benchmark, allowing us to capture how AI aggregation affects learning. Our main result identifies a threshold in the speed of updating: when the aggregator updates too quickly, there is no positive-measure set of training weights that robustly improves learning across a broad class of environments, whereas such weights exist when updating is sufficiently slow. We then compare global and local architectures. Local aggregators trained on proximate or topic-specific data robustly improve learning in all environments. Consequently, replacing specialized local aggregators with a single global aggregator worsens learning in at least one dimension of the state.