AI agents can form political camps—and changing their conversation partners does little to soften their views

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Give AI agents political positions, ask them to defend their views and persuade one another, and let them decide which contacts to keep. This recent experiment, published in Nature Communications, found that over repeated exchanges, something familiar emerged: opposing camps that increasingly prefer their own company.

In the simulations created by Jinghua Piao of Tsinghua University in China and colleagues, the agents were not explicitly instructed to favor like-minded partners or form echo chambers. Yet their exchanges produced increasingly divided opinions and networks. Once those divisions took hold, the researchers tried to loosen them.

Would changing whom the agents encountered help—or did the agents need different instructions about how to listen? For their study, the team built networks of 1,000 agents discussing one issue at a time: U.S. party alignment, gun control or abortion bans. The main experiments used GPT-3.5, with additional tests involving other language models.

Each agent began with an assigned position on a five-point political scale: left, moderate left, neutral, moderate right, and right. About 40% started neutral, making the middle the largest group. During each round, agents generated reasons for their positions and messages intended to persuade others.

They could maintain existing contacts or encounter someone new, then update their stated opinions using the messages they received. After 40 rounds, the neutral share had fallen to 22.5% for party alignment, 0.4% for gun control and 5.1% for abortion bans. Agents increasingly interacted with others on their own side.

Exchanges with more strongly opinionated allies tended to push their positions further from neutral. But some agents also struggled to stay in character. One assigned a neutral stance declared strong support for the Democratic Party.