The Rise of AI Populated Virtual Towns.

Researchers from Stanford University and Google have created a virtual sandbox called Smallville, populated by 25 generative AI "agents" with their own identities, goals, and roles to play. The experiment aimed to examine how the agents interacted with each other and their environment, resulting in a functioning village with "believable individual and emergent social behaviors." The agents drew on generative models to simulate human behavior and interacted with each other in real language, making high-level inferences from information they learned. The experiment raises ethical concerns, but also has vast potential applications beyond the sandbox demonstration.