5.3 Society Simulation with LLM-based Agents

The concept of “Simulated Society” in this section serves as a dynamic system where agents engage
in intricate interactions within a well-defined environment. Recent research on simulated societies
has followed two primary lines, namely, exploring the boundaries of the collective intelligence
capabilities of LLM-based agents [109; 405; 130; 406; 410] and using them to accelerate discoveries
in the social sciences [22; 518; 542]. In addition, there are also a number of noteworthy studies, e.g.,
using simulated societies to collect synthetic datasets [108; 519; 543], helping people to simulate rare
yet difficult interpersonal situations [544; 545]. With the foundation of the previous sections (§ 5.1,
5.2), here we will introduce the key properties and mechanism of agent society (§ 5.3.1), what we
can learn from emergent social phenomena (§ 5.3.2), and finally the potential ethical and social risks
in it (§ 5.3.3).
TheRiseandPotentialofLargeLanguageModel BasedAgents