Hundreds of chatbots could show us how to make social media less toxic

A social media algorithm designed to bridge the gap between people with different political views could reduce the toxicity of online discourse and promote better conversations. It appears to be effective – at least in tests on hundreds of AI-generated users.

Petter Törnberg at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues created 500 chatbots powered by a large language model (LLM) and got them to interact with each other as if they were on a social …