Swarm Creativity Blog

This summer, we experienced firsthand the damage caused by blind faith in the "superhuman" capabilities of generative AI, even among otherwise intelligent individuals. Here's what happened. We submitted a research paper to an academic conference, and after it was accepted, I paid the registration fee, booked flights, and arranged accommodations. A week later, we received an abrupt email from the organizers stating that our paper had been rejected. The reason? Their AI-based plagiarism and ChatGPT-detection tool flagged it as containing both plagiarized content and text generated by ChatGPT. This accusation was entirely unfounded. Our paper presented highly original work by our team, proposing novel AI algorithms to predict animal emotions—a concept never explored before. We detailed the development of an AI model to validate this approach, something completely unique to our research. By its very nature, it was impossible for our work to be plagiarized or generated by Chat...

We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the...

It’s all about relationships: interacting with other people can be the biggest source of happiness, but it can also be the biggest source of misery! The quality of your relationships is determined by your emotions: When you manage your emotions during a disagreement with your best friend, it helps keep your friendship intact. However, if you lose control and get really angry, it can lead to losing your job or even causing harm in situations like road rage. Your relationships also determine the meaning in your life. If you have spent years searching for the meaning of life but nobody else cares about it, your hard work won't bring much satisfaction.You will only get meaning from what you do if you are surrounded by likeminded people. Even more, the people who make you happiest will also tell you WHAT makes you happiest! To measure and improve happiness, I thus came up with the “Emotions, Relationships, and Meaning” (ERM) Way to Happiness. We have previously used the PERMA model fro...

My research of the last twenty years was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory . In his Foundation Series science fiction stories, Asimov describes how mathematician Hari Seldon was able to predict the future a thousand years ahead through the discipline of psychohistory that Seldon invented. Its premise was that while it is impossible to predict the behavior of an individual, the aggregated behavior of millions and billions of people extending over the galaxy can be predicted accurately by studying their communication patterns. However already in his stories Asimov posited that it is impossible to predict “ black swan events ”, i.e. unexpected random events. In Asimov’s story, the appearance of the “Mule”, a mutant conqueror who could read and manipulate the mind of others, a few hundred years after Seldon made his predictions, threw Seldon’s predictions totally off. This is where Babelfish comes in, a tool envisioned by Douglas Adams in his science fiction c...

The developers of ChatGPT built extremely useful software, putting a “Wikipedia on steroids” at our fingertips by leveraging collective intelligence in ways never seen before. In this sense, as defined by Plato and Aristotle over two thousand years ago, they are “good people”. This means they are morally good or virtuous by giving away a highly beneficial software product for free that makes many chores of the daily life of knowledge workers much easier. These AI developers are thus acting according to the golden rule (of reciprocity), treating others as they would like to be treated. The problem is that not everybody who writes AI software is a “good” person. If only one percent of AI developers acts entirely egoistic, or even malicious, there is the risk that these “bad apples” will abuse the power of AI for their own sinister purposes, without any consideration for the wellbeing of the rest of us. But what if we could turn the power of AI on these “bad apples”, to identify them be...

Increasingly people confess their deepest psychological problems to artificial intelligence instead of a human psychotherapist. While I don’t think AI will fully replace human psychotherapists in in the near future, ever since Weizenbaum in 1964 created the psychotherapy program “Eliza”, people discuss issues about their inner self with seemingly ever more intelligent AI. My co-author Marc Schreiber and I just finished a short book for the Springer Essentials series discussing the role of AI for different aspects of psychology (in German). As ChatGPT is capable of leading increasingly sophisticated dialogs about basically any topic , we decided to let it rewrite our book, using the same chapter structure as the Springer book, but all content written by ChatGPT. Here is the l ink to the formatted book rewritten by ChatGPT , as well as the transcript of our dialog with ChatGPT , both in German, as well as the translation to English by Deepl of the ChatGPT book. On a side note, as Sp...