It only takes AI agents 2 hours to replicate your personality with 85% accuracy

Researchers have discovered that a two-hour conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) model is all it takes to make an accurate replica of someone’s personality.

In a new study published Nov. 15 to the preprint database arXiv, researchers from Google and Stanford University created “simulation agents” — essentially, AI replicas — of 1,052 individuals based on two-hour interviews with each participant.

These interviews were used to train a generative AI model designed to mimic human behavior. To evaluate the accuracy of the AI replicas, each participant completed two rounds of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games and was asked to repeat the process two weeks later.

When the AI replicas underwent the same tests, they matched the responses of their human counterparts with 85% accuracy.

The paper proposed that AI models that emulate human behavior could be useful across a variety of research scenarios, such as evaluating the effectiveness of public health policies, understanding responses to product launches, or even modeling reactions to major societal events that might otherwise be too costly, challenging or ethically complex to study with human participants.

“General-purpose simulation of human attitudes and behavior — where each simulated person can engage across a range of social, political, or informational contexts — could enable a laboratory for researchers to test a broad set of interventions and theories,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

Simulations could also help pilot new public interventions, develop theories around causal and contextual interactions, and increase our understanding of how institutions and networks influence people, they added.

To create the simulation agents, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews that covered participants’ life stories, values and opinions on societal issues.

This enabled the AI to capture nuances that typical surveys or demographic data might miss, the researchers explained. Most importantly, the structure of these interviews gave researchers the freedom to highlight what they found most important to them personally.