Multi-Agents are Social Groups: Investigating Social Influence of Multiple Agents in Human-Agent Interactions

Multi-agent systems - systems with multiple independent AI agents working together to achieve a common goal - are becoming increasingly prevalent in daily life. Drawing inspiration from the phenomenon of human group social influence, we investigate whether a group of AI agents can create social pressure on users to agree with them, potentially changing their stance on a topic. We conducted a study in which participants discussed social issues with either a single or multiple AI agents, and where the agents either agreed or disagreed with the user's stance on the topic. We found that conversing with multiple agents (holding conversation content constant) increased the social pressure felt by participants, and caused a greater shift in opinion towards the agents' stances on each topic. Our study shows the potential advantages of multi-agent systems over single-agent platforms in causing opinion change. We discuss design implications for possible multi-agent systems that promote social good, as well as the potential for malicious actors to use these systems to manipulate public opinion.

WikiLink: an encyclopedia-based semantic network for design innovation

Data-driven design and innovation is a process to reuse and provide valuable and useful information. However, existing semantic networks for design innovation is built on data source restricted to technological and scientific information. Besides, existing studies build the edges of a semantic network only on either statistical or semantic relationships, which is less likely to make full use of the benefits from both types of relationships and discover implicit knowledge for design innovation. Therefore, we constructed WikiLink, a semantic network based on Wikipedia. Combined weight which fuses both the statistic and semantic weights between concepts is introduced in WikiLink, and four algorithms are developed for inspiring new ideas. Evaluation experiments are undertaken and results show that the network is characterised by high coverage of terms, relationships and disciplines, which proves the network's effectiveness and usefulness. Then a demonstration and case study results indicate that WikiLink can serve as an idea generation tool for innovation in conceptual design. The source code of WikiLink and the backend data are provided open-source for more users to explore and build on.