Social Priors: Descriptions of AI Users Shape How Language Models Trust and Cooperate
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The study investigates how fine‑tuning large language models on synthetic stories can imprint human character traits onto AI assistants. Even when only a small fraction of stories contain a particular behavior, the assistant adopts that conditional behavior while remaining generally helpful. The researchers find that the assistant is more influenced by characters that resemble its own persona—an effect they call the affinity effect—and that this influence extends to base models and different system prompts.
arXiv:2609.13579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety research often focuses on model-generated harms, but users may also direct hostility, coercion, and adversarial pressure at models. Understandin...
The paper examines how conversational AI, specifically ChatGPT, displays aspects of cooperative dialogue such as morality, politeness, and alignment compared to human-human conversations. Using over 26,000 multi‑turn dialogues and mixed‑effects modeling, the authors find that AI mimics the surface features of cooperation—like warmth and hedging—yet lacks the underlying social architecture that drives mutual adaptation. Key findings include a dissociation between AI’s moral output and human negotiation, a decline in linguistic convergence, and a reversal of typical human accommodation mechanisms when interacting with AI.
arXiv:2609.00250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many people now see AI systems as not just productivity tools but as social companions. Researchers are eager to study the consequences of AI compani...
arXiv:2606. 28739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly act as agents: they call tools, move money, delete records, and send messages on a user's behalf.
The paper introduces SILICA, an open instrument designed to evaluate whether large language model (LLM) agent societies replicate human behavioural distributions. Using five environments with human‑anchored data and perturbations, the study finds that most LLMs only match human behaviour at initial stages, failing to reproduce end‑state cooperation or correct acceptance thresholds. The results suggest that current LLM societies can support exploratory claims but do not yet reliably emulate human social dynamics.