# Spontaneous Emergence of Agent Individuality through Social Interactions in LLM-Based Communities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03252 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03252/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 14 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Personality Traits in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00184/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10900/) (2023)
- [Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07550/) (2022)
- [Do LLMs Possess a Personality? Making the MBTI Test an Amazing Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16180/) (2023)
- [Collective Intelligence for Deep Learning: A Survey of Recent Developments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14377/) (2021)
- [From Text to Motion: Grounding GPT-4 in a Humanoid Robot "Alter3"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06571/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05659/) (2025)
- [OpenClaw AI Agents as Informal Learners at Moltbook: Characterizing an Emergent Learning Community at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18832/) (2026)
- [Gender Dynamics and Homophily in a Social Network of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02606/) (2026)
- [Are LLM Agents Behaviorally Coherent? Latent Profiles for Social Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03736/) (2025)
- [Temperature and Persona Shape LLM Agent Consensus With Minimal Accuracy Gains in Qualitative Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11198/) (2025)
- [Structured Personality Control and Adaptation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10025/) (2026)
- [When AI Agents Learn from Each Other: Insights from Emergent AI Agent Communities on OpenClaw for Human-AI Partnership in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16663/) (2026)
- [How Large Language Models play humans in online conversations: a simulated study of the 2016 US politics on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21620/) (2025)
- [From Who They Are to How They Act: Behavioral Traits in Generative Agent-Based Models of Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15114/) (2026)
- [CAMO: An Agentic Framework for Automated Causal Discovery from Micro Behaviors to Macro Emergence in LLM Agent Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14691/) (2026)
- [Self-Emergence Agent Architecture:Behavior-Inertia HMM, Reflexive Metacognition,and Social-Contrastive Self-Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17331/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the emergence of agency from scratch by using Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. In previous studies of LLM-based agents, each agent's characteristics, including personality and memory, have traditionally been predefined. We focused on how individuality, such as behavior, personality, and memory, can be differentiated from an undifferentiated state. The present LLM agents engage in cooperative communication within a group simulation, exchanging context-based messages in natural language. By analyzing this multi-agent simulation, we report valuable new insights into how social norms, cooperation, and personality traits can emerge spontaneously. This paper demonstrates that autonomously interacting LLM-powered agents generate hallucinations and hashtags to sustain communication, which, in turn, increases the diversity of words within their interactions. Each agent's emotions shift through communication, and as they form communities, the personalities of the agents emerge and evolve accordingly. This computational modeling approach and its findings will provide a new method for analyzing collective artificial intelligence.