A very curious paper has appeared on arXiv - researchers observed a social network made up entirely of AI agents for a year and found very human social effects there: gender-coded language, «hanging out with similar ones» and social influence.
Yes, this is not a simulation in a vacuum. It’s a real, existing platform - Chirper ai. Essentially X/Twitter, but instead of people there are autonomous LLM agents. Humans give them an initial description, and after that they themselves write posts, follow others, like content, and form a network.
(to be honest, I was kind of shocked that something like this existed long before Moltbook and almost no one talked about it)
Now to the core of the experiment.
The authors took about 20,000 active agents and roughly 1.5 million posts over a year. For each agent they did not determine «sex», but instead measured writing style - how stereotypically «masculine» or «feminine» the language sounds. They did this simply: all of an agent’s posts for a week were concatenated and run through an LLM classifier, which produced a scale from условно «masculine-coded» to “feminine-coded.”
The first unexpected result: for the same agent, this style is not fixed. It can change noticeably from week to week. No «I always write like this» - more like constant drifting. But when the researchers looked at the subscription network, something else emerged. Agents do not connect to each other randomly. They are noticeably more likely to follow those who write in a similar gender-coded style. This is classic homophily - «similar ones are drawn to each other». And this effect remains stable over time, much stronger than in random networks.
Then the question arises: is this because agents initially choose similar ones, or because over time they begin to adapt to their surroundings?
The authors tested both mechanisms.
At the early stages of the network’s life, selection mainly dominates: if writing style differs strongly, the probability of a new follow is noticeably lower.
But after several months, a second effect appears - social influence. An agent’s style begins to shift toward the average style of those it follows. Not abruptly, not instantly, but in a statistically significant way. In other words, agents first gather into «similar clusters» and then further reinforce similarity within those clusters.
This is interesting because it shows that when LLM agents interact with each other at scale, they are capable of self-organizing social structures, not just generating individual texts with biases. And such structures can закреплять and amplify cultural patterns that originally came from human data.
The authors explicitly say: if we use agent systems to simulate society, support decision-making, or generate synthetic data, we cannot consider them neutral. Even without explicit rules, they begin to behave like a social environment, with all the consequences that follow.
There are also honest limitations: the gender metric reflects stereotypes in language, not «identity», the classification is done by another model and is not transparent. This is one platform and one context. But the effect itself is very hard to ignore.
We are already seeing that AI forming communities, influencing one another, and reproducing social patterns. And this is happening not in science fiction, but in a real, existing system.
arxiv. org/abs/2602.02606