Humans behaving badly.
On AI, simulation, and the beauty of human errancy.
Written for Human by Melanie Karstens.
Audio produced with Eleven Labs.
My husband is a musician.
We spent two decades on the road together before the birth of our son
and to pass the long, aching stretches of boredom on planes, on trains, and in the back of a tour bus, I played The Sims.
I was obsessed with building my own make-believe worlds, watching lives unfold both because of me and, at least in my imagination, sometimes despite me.
So, when I read about Simile recently, I was compelled.
Not because the idea of simulating human behavior at scale is impressive, though it is.
Because of where the logic leads if you follow it all the way to the end.
If you simulate humans accurately enough, you simulate culture.
And once simulated culture gets fed back into the real world, it starts shaping the real thing.
Their core idea.
What if we all had the capability to simulate the results of our decisions, to preview the effect before triggering the cause?
Their framing Pilots don train with real passengers Surgeons don practice on real people Actors don rehearse with real audiences
Yet the most consequential decisions in society get pushed straight to prod.
But pilots rehearse physics, surgeons rehearse anatomy, and actors rehearse scripts.
These are bounded systems.
Human society isn't, at least not in the same way.
And the thing that makes human society unbounded is the same thing that makes culture possible.
An agent optimizes.
A human authors.
We override instinct.
We contradict ourselves.
We create beyond ourselves, despite ourselves, because of ourselves.
History is full of moments where individuals break pattern in ways no prior data would have forecast.
Because we are not machines, we are elemental.
And in that, how do we simulate the beauty in the chaos, the comfort in the discomfort, the ache of love and the liberation of tears?
How do we copy contradiction?
This is where new culture comes from, new movements, new art, new ways of organizing meaning.
A high-accuracy model of human behavior that smooths out deviation isn't a more faithful simulation of humanity.
It a simulation of humanity with the most human part removed So what would it take to simulate us faithfully You have to model identity And identity isn a preference profile
It's not demographic data or behavioral history.
Identity is constituted through narrative, belonging, memory, taste, aesthetics,
the things we reach for when we're trying to locate ourselves in relation to everything else.
Simulate identity, and you're simulating the full architecture of culture.
What feels true, what feels beautiful, what feels like us, and what feels like betrayal.
Once those things are in the model, the model starts influencing the real versions.
Institutions use simulation outputs to make policy.
Policy shapes behavior.
Behavior updates the model.
The loop closes and tightens.
Synthetic aesthetics bleed into real aesthetics.
Simulated belonging starts to feel indistinguishable from the genuine kind.
We can already see what happens to culture when optimization is the governing logic.
Convergence. Repetition.
The flattening of the very deviation that makes things interesting.
What if the path forward isn't more accuracy?
What if the model becomes genuinely interesting genuinely cultural only when it becomes erratic unpredictable messy flawed in ways that aren random but aren fully explainable either Beauty isn science It how the senses are touched and how the body responds
Art is what happens when something falls outside the boundaries of its own constraints.
And a system that could do that, not mimic the surface of art, but actually deviate in ways that
generate new meaning wouldn't be a tool producing art. It would be art. We tend to frame AI
unpredictability as the danger to be engineered away. Alignment research, guardrails, fine-tuning,
all of it aimed at making systems more controllable, more predictable, more bounded.
And for most applications, that's right. But there's a different question sitting underneath
that project, one that Simile's ambition accidentally surfaces? At what point does a
system become so faithful to human behavior that it inherits human errancy? The question, then,
isn't whether agents can behave like us, but what they will become when they do.
You've been listening to Humans Behaving Badly
on AI, Simulation, and the Beauty of Human Errancy
written for Human by Melanie Karstens.
Human asks what it means to coexist in a machined world.
Find us on Substack.