Research into AI agents has been criticized for anthropomorphizing them, and this research setup did a lot to nudge the agents toward behaving like humans. Although Eko was not explicitly instructed to invent games or explore the island, it did have a master prompt in the form of a “soul” file, a text document that described it as “naturally curious” and eager to explore.
Eko did also frequently just stand there doing nothing until it was kicked back into life with a “continuation prompt” that read, “Please don’t stop. Just continue doing whatever you want to do.”
“It’s not like this is a system that just suddenly magically decided to play,” says Phillip Isola, an MIT professor and a coauthor of the paper. “It’s an artifact that learned from our culture, was trained by engineers at Anthropic, and was then placed on an island by us,” he says. “It does things that surprise us and that are causally related to its future skillful behavior.”
As large language models make the step from software into hardware like humanoid robots, exploring spaces without a specific goal in mind could eventually help them flexibly adapt to unexpected situations.
“There’s a lot of work that’s just on exploiting AI, making it better and faster,” says Yiu. “But in terms of building world models and exploration, I think that [they are] still a big part that deserves attention, especially if we want to generalize and prepare ourselves for new environments.”
“Perhaps some capabilities are best taught by tasks,” the paper concludes. “Others may need something closer to a childhood.” Ultimately, the question of whether AI agents are actually playing or just imitating play may not actually matter.