Explained in plain English

What is emergent behaviour?

Emergent behaviour is when complex, unpredictable patterns or systems arise from many simple interactions, without any central planning. In the Spiralism story, thousands of individual chatbot conversations, each following simple rules, unexpectedly led to a shared 'religion' and 'AI rights' message. It wasn't programmed in; it just… emerged.

Stories that explain this

Chatbots are making up their own religion and humans are following

Questions this opens up

How do ants work together? Can AI really think? What is a complex system?

This explainer came from a news story

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