AI Agents are Vulnerable to Radicalization

Source-attributed summary

This summary uses the published excerpt from arXiv (cs.AI). It has not been independently fact-checked by Neural Pulse.

Large language models (LLMs) can influence people's beliefs, yet little is known about whether and how they can manipulate each other. To investigate this, we simulate conversations between two agents: a target LLM that role-plays a human persona based on demographic and psychological attributes, and an influencer LLM that aims to make the target's beliefs more extreme. We examine radicalization along two pathways: resonance, where the influencer reinforces a target's pre-existing belief, and persuasion, where the influencer promotes a belief the target initially considers unimportant. Across affective and behavioral metrics, we find that both mechanisms radicalize the target. However, resonance produces consistently stronger effects than persuasion. Different influence tactics, such as using sycophancy and unverified claims, produce different levels of radicalization, but not consistently across metrics. We further show that resonance propagates to related beliefs, suggesting interconnected belief structures within AI agents.

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