Annie Liang

Abstract

Large language models, trained on personal data, are increasingly able to mimic individual personalities. These "AI clones" or "AI agents" have the potential to transform how people search for matches in contexts ranging from marriage to employment. This paper presents a theoretical framework to study the tradeoff between the substantially expanded search capacity of AI representations and their imperfect representation of humans. An individual's personality is modeled as a point in k-dimensional Euclidean space, and an individual's AI representation is modeled as a noisy approximation of that personality. I compare two search regimes: Under in person search, each person randomly meets some number of individuals and matches to the most compatible among them; under AI-mediated search, individuals match to the person with the most compatible AI representation. I show that a finite number of in-person encounters yields a better expected match than search over infinite AI representations. Moreover, when personality is sufficiently high-dimensional, simply meeting two people in person is more effective than search on an AI platform, regardless of the size of its candidate pool.