AI villagers spread a fake bread rumor in 18 hours; truth took days to catch up
bennash · x · 2026-09-27
A simulation experiment with 200 AI villagers (Jev, by TypeSafe): told the bread was running out (a lie), 156 believed it within 18 hours and emptied the bakery three days straight.
The truth surfaced on day 3 — a flour cart and a villager who'd seen the mill — and by day 5, 172 of 200 knew it was false. But the truth took over two days to reach as many people as the lie did in 18 hours, and the bakery kept selling out even after the debunk. "Just like real people," quips bennash.
More from AGI Musings
- Could perfect monosemanticity enable training coding agents without verifiers or RL? — menhguin · 2026-09-27
- OpenAI's littmath: Hodge, BSD and Riemann hypotheses are 'probably all true' — littmath · 2026-09-27
- Edgar Pavlovsky: AI iteration may be making us worse at shipping — edgarpavlovsky · 2026-09-27
- In an AGI regime every team member has to be a 'barrel' — agents are the bullets — annbordetsky · 2026-09-27
- Interpretability researcher proposes predicting agent behavior by cross-referencing other agents' hidden states — jachiam0 · 2026-09-27
- Brain foundation models loom as brain-body-behavior multimodal datasets emerge — himanshustwts · 2026-09-27