Related papers: Is Human Culture Locked by Evolution?
How can large language models (LLMs) serve users with varying preferences that may conflict across cultural, political, or other dimensions? To advance this challenge, this paper establishes four key results. First, we demonstrate, through…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Recommendation systems increasingly depend on massive human-labeled datasets; however, the human annotators hired to generate these labels increasingly come from homogeneous backgrounds. This poses an issue when downstream predictive models…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, yet evaluations focus primarily on task success rather than cultural appropriateness or evaluator reliability. We introduce LiveCultureBench, a multi-cultural,…
Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
In this work the impact of the Internet culture on standard mainstream societies has been analyzed. After analytically establishing the fact that the Net can be viewed as a pan-societal superstructure which supports its own distinct…
The impact of continually evolving digital technologies and the proliferation of communications and content has now been widely acknowledged to be central to understanding our world. What is less acknowledged is that this is based on the…
Law codes and regulations help organise societies for centuries, and as AI systems gain more autonomy, we question how human-agent systems can operate as peers under the same norms, especially when resources are contended. We posit that…
Political beliefs vary significantly across different countries, reflecting distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. These ideologies, ranging from liberal democracies to rigid autocracies, influence human societies, as…
Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in all large-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to the behavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced by others in the…
Decisions such as which movie to watch next, which song to listen to, or which product to buy online, are increasingly influenced by recommender systems and user models that incorporate information on users' past behaviours, preferences,…
Most modern recommendation algorithms are data-driven: they generate personalized recommendations by observing users' past behaviors. A common assumption in recommendation is that how a user interacts with a piece of content (e.g., whether…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
The advent of online social networks has led to the development of an abundant literature on the study of online social groups and their relationship to individuals' personalities as revealed by their textual productions. Social structures…
Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for potential romantic partners. It is important to understand users' dating preferences in order to make better recommendations on potential dates. The message sending…
We describe a computational model of social norms based on identifying values that a certain culture finds desirable such as dignity, generosity and politeness. The model quantifies these values in the form of Culture-Sanctioned Social…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
User content curation is becoming an important source of preference data, as well as providing information regarding the items being curated. One popular approach involves the creation of lists. On Twitter, these lists might contain…
The integration of large language models into political discourse analysis creates new opportunities for comparative research, policy analysis, and civic technology, while introducing material risks for democratic accountability. This paper…