A new study suggests that populations of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, similar to ChatGPT, can spontaneously develop shared social conventions through interaction alone.

The research from City St George’s, University of London and the IT University of Copenhagen suggests that when these large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) agents communicate in groups, they do not just follow scripts or repeat patterns, but self-organize, reaching consensus on linguistic norms much like human communities.

The study, “Emergent Social Conventions and Collective Bias in LLM Populations,” is published in the journal Science Advances.