The digital twin Lane is speaking of is CulturePulse’s multi-agent AI model that they are currently building for the UN. The model will ultimately create a virtual version of each and every one of the 15 million people who live in Israel and the Palestinian territories, each imbued with demographics, religious beliefs, and moral values that echo their real-world counterparts, according to Shults and Lane.
In total, CulturePulse’s model can factor in over 80 categories to each “agent,” including traits like anger, anxiety, personality, morality, family, friends, finances, inclusivity, racism, and hate speech.
“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 system will 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 correlation 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 will factor it into its analysis.
“We actually deliberately want to make sure that those materials that are biased are being put into these models. They just need to be put into the model in a psychologically real way,” Lane says.
