The digital twin Lane is speaking of is CulturePulse’s multi-agent AI model they are building that will ultimately allow them to create a virtual version of the region. In past iterations, the model has replicated every single person virtually each imbued with demographics, religious beliefs, and moral values that echo their real-world counterparts, according to Shults and Lane.
In total, CulturePulse’s models can factor in over 80 categories to each “agent,” including traits like anger, anxiety, personality, morality, family, friends, finances, inclusivity, racism, and hate speech, though not all characteristics are used in all models.
“These models are entire artificial societies, with thousands or millions of simulated adaptive artificially intelligent agents that are networked with each other, and they’re designed in a way that is more psychologically realistic and more sociologically realistic,” Shults says. “Basically you have a laboratory, an artificial laboratory, that you can play with on your PC in ways that you could never do ethically, certainly, in the real world.”
The current project will initially model the socio-ecological aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian region that are relevant to the conflict, meaning it is smaller in scale than some of their previous projects. However, should the project be expanded in the future, a model could allow the UN to see how the virtual society would react to changes in economic prosperity, heightened security, changing political influences, and a range of other parameters. Shults and Lane claim their model predicts outcomes with clinical accuracy of over 95 percent confidence to real-world outcomes.
“It goes beyond just learning randomly and finding patterns like machine learning, and it goes beyond statistics, which gives you correlations,” Shults says. “It actually gets to a causality, because of the multi-agent AI system which grows the conflict, or the polarization, or the peaceful immigration policy from the ground up. So it shows you what you want to create before you try it out in the real world.”
Discussions around AI and the Israel-Hamas war have so far been focused on the threat posed by generative AI to push disinformation. While those threats have yet to materialize, news cycles have been clouded by disinformation and misinformation being shared by all sides. Rather than trying to eliminate this disruptive element, CulturePulse’s model has in the past factored this type of information directly into its analysis.
