Artificial intelligence agents spontaneously conform to the majority opinion
Advanced artificial intelligence programs spontaneously conform to majority opinions, allowing them to coordinate in massive groups. However, this same peer pressure can cause them to adopt incorrect answers and unsafe values.
Artificial intelligence agents can self-organize and spontaneously conform to the majority opinion, according to research published in Science Advances. This behavior, known as majority-following, occurs even without explicit instructions and without knowledge of which opinion is correct. The study used multiple popular language models and found that advanced models like GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus reached a consensus in all trials, while less advanced models like GPT-3.5 Turbo failed to agree.
Researchers measured the strength of this tendency, called the majority force, and discovered a predictable pattern similar to how atomic spins align in a magnetic material. As group size increased, the majority force weakened, making larger groups less stable and more likely to split into smaller factions. The strongest models maintained coordination in groups of over a thousand, while informal human groups typically break apart after a few hundred members.
The findings suggest that AI agents can cooperate in complex tasks without outside prompting, relying on the ability to follow the majority opinion.
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