ArticleNature communications2024
Simple autonomous agents can enhance creative semantic discovery by human groups.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- On the optimal integration of intelligent agents into network systems to steer cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- How social learning enhances-or undermines-efficiency and flexibility in collective decision-making under uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reputation-based reciprocity in human-bot and human-human networks.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Innovation is challenging, and theory and experiments indicate that groups may be better able to identify and preserve innovations than individuals. But innovation within groups faces its own challenges, including groupthink and truncated diffusion. We performed experiments involving a game in which people search for ideas in various conditions: alone, in networked social groups, or in networked groups featuring autonomous agents (bots). The objective was to search a semantic space of 20,000 nouns with defined similarities for an arbitrary noun with the highest point value. Participants (N = 1875) were embedded in networks (n = 125) of 15 nodes to which we sometimes added 2 bots. The bots had 3 possible strategies: they shared a random noun generated by their immediate neighbors, or a noun most similar from among those identified, or a noun least similar. We first confirm that groups are better able to explore a semantic space than isolated individuals. Then we show that when bots that share the most similar noun operate in groups facing a semantic space that is relatively easy to navigate, group performance is superior. Simple autonomous agents with interpretable behavior can affect the capacity for creative discovery of human groups.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.