Join the Cyber Policy Center on February 18 from 1PM–2PM Pacific for a seminar with Robb Willer, Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and Co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  

About the Seminar

Advances in large language models (LLMs) now enable simulation of human behavior for application to social science research. In this talk, I present two interrelated lines of work. First, we use GPT-4 to simulate responses of experimental participants, predicting observed experimental effects with accuracy comparable to—or better than—human forecasters, even for unpublished studies. Second, we introduce a generative agent architecture that replicates the responses and behaviors of over 1,000 individuals, approaching the accuracy of repeated self-assessment and largely mitigating gaps in predictive accuracy for different demographic groups. I conclude by highlighting the promise and challenges of leveraging LLMs to augment social science research and inform policy.

About the Speaker