Imitating AI agents increase diversity in homogeneous information environments but can reduce it in heterogeneous ones
Emil Bakkensen Johansen, Oliver Baumann · Mar 20, 2025 · Citations: 0
How to use this paper page
Coverage: StaleUse this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.
Best use
Background context only
Metadata: StaleTrust level
Low
Signals: StaleWhat still needs checking
Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.
Signal confidence: 0.30
Abstract
Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have facilitated autonomous AI agents capable of imitating human-generated content, raising fundamental questions about how AI may reshape democratic information environments such as news. We develop a large-scale simulation framework to examine the system-level effects of AI-based imitation, using the full population of Danish digital news articles published in 2022. Varying imitation strategies and AI prevalence across information environments with different baseline structures, we show that the effects of AI-driven imitation are strongly context-dependent: imitating AI agents increase semantic diversity in initially homogeneous environments but can reduce diversity in heterogeneous ones. This pattern is qualitatively consistent across multiple LLMs. However, this diversity arises primarily through stylistic differentiation and variance compression rather than factual enrichment, as AI-generated articles tend to omit information while remaining semantically distinct. These findings indicate that AI-driven imitation produces ambivalent transformations of information environments that may shape collective intelligence in democratic societies.