arXiv subjects

Martin Smit

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Smit.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trust or Check? Understanding the (Evolutionary) Dynamics of User Trust in AI Systems

As the capabilities and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems grow, trust in these AI systems is an increasingly urgent concern. Much research has focused on models of AI governance and has primarily examined incentives for safe development and effective regulation. Hence they typically represented users trust as a one-shot adoption choice rather than as a dynamic, evolving process shaped by repeated interactions. We instead model trust as the dynamic choice of reduced monitoring in a repeated, asymmetric interaction between users and AI developers, where checking developers' behaviour is costly. Using evolutionary game theory, we study how users' strategies of trust and developers' strategies of providing safe (compliant) or unsafe (non-compliant) AI co-evolve under different levels of monitoring cost and institutional regimes. We conduct the analysis on both imitation-based and learning-based perspectives, with the stochastic finite-population dynamics, the infinite-population replicator analysis and the reinforcement learning analysis. We find three robust long-run regimes: no adoption by users while developers provide unsafe AI, unsafe but widely adopted systems, and safe systems that are widely adopted. Only the last is desirable, and it arises when penalties for unsafe behaviour exceed the extra cost of safety and users can still afford to monitor at least occasionally. Our results formally support governance proposals that emphasise transparency, low-cost monitoring, and meaningful sanctions, and they show that neither regulation alone nor blind user trust is sufficient to prevent the drift towards unsafe or low-adoption outcomes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Simulated Affection, Engineered Trust: How Anthropomorphic AI Benefits Surveillance Capitalism

In this paper, we argue that anthropomorphized technology, designed to simulate emotional realism, are not neutral tools but cognitive infrastructures that manipulate user trust and behaviour. This reinforces the logic of surveillance capitalism, an under-regulated economic system that profits from behavioural manipulation and monitoring. Drawing on Nicholas Carr's theory of the intellectual ethic, we identify how technologies such as chatbots, virtual assistants, or generative models reshape not only what we think about ourselves and our world, but how we think at the cognitive level. We identify how the emerging intellectual ethic of AI benefits a system of surveillance capitalism, and discuss the potential ways of addressing this.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Learning Fair Cooperation in Mixed-Motive Games with Indirect Reciprocity

Altruistic cooperation is costly yet socially desirable. As a result, agents struggle to learn cooperative policies through independent reinforcement learning (RL). Indirect reciprocity, where agents consider their interaction partner's reputation, has been shown to stabilise cooperation in homogeneous, idealised populations. However, more realistic settings are comprised of heterogeneous agents with different characteristics and group-based social identities. We study cooperation when agents are stratified into two such groups, and allow reputation updates and actions to depend on group information. We consider two modelling approaches: evolutionary game theory, where we comprehensively search for social norms (i.e., rules to assign reputations) leading to cooperation and fairness; and RL, where we consider how the stochastic dynamics of policy learning affects the analytically identified equilibria. We observe that a defecting majority leads the minority group to defect, but not the inverse. Moreover, changing the norms that judge in and out-group interactions can steer a system towards either fair or unfair cooperation. This is made clearer when moving beyond equilibrium analysis to independent RL agents, where convergence to fair cooperation occurs with a narrower set of norms. Our results highlight that, in heterogeneous populations with reputations, carefully defining interaction norms is fundamental to tackle both dilemmas of cooperation and of fairness.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2022

TOI-4562 b: A highly eccentric temperate Jupiter analog orbiting a young field star

We report the discovery of TOI-4562 b (TIC-349576261), a Jovian planet orbiting a young F7V-type star, younger than the Praesepe/Hyades clusters (< $700$ Myr). This planet stands out because of its unusually long orbital period for transiting planets with known masses ($P_{\mathrm{orb}}$ = $225.11781^{+0.00025}_{-0.00022}$ days), and because it has a substantial eccentricity ($e$ = $0.76^{+0.02}_{-0.02}$). The location of TOI-4562 near the southern continuous viewing zone of TESS allowed observations throughout 25 sectors, enabling an unambiguous period measurement from TESS alone. Alongside the four available TESS transits, we performed follow-up photometry using the South African Astronomical Observatory node of the Las Cumbres Observatory, and spectroscopy with the CHIRON spectrograph on the 1.5 m SMARTS telescope. We measure a radius of $1.118_{+0.013}^{-0.014}$ $R_{\mathrm{J}}$ and a mass of $2.30^{+0.48}_{-0.47}$ $M_{\mathrm{J}}$ for TOI-4562 b. The radius of the planet is consistent with contraction models describing the early evolution of the size of giant planets. We detect tentative transit timing variations at the $\sim$ 20 min level from five transit events, favouring the presence of a companion that could explain the dynamical history of this system if confirmed by future follow-up observations. With its current orbital configuration, tidal timescales are too long for TOI-4562 b to become a hot-Jupiter via high eccentricity migration, though it is not excluded that interactions with the possible companion could modify TOI-4562 b eccentricity and trigger circularization. The characterisation of more such young systems is essential to set constraints on models describing giant planet evolution.

astro-ph.EP↗