Northeastern Researchers are Pioneering the Study of Human-AI Coevolution

As AI systems become deeply embedded in our daily lives, understanding the interplay between humans and AI is more important than ever. Researchers at Northeastern University, alongside other global leaders, are at the forefront of this exploration with a groundbreaking new field of study:  “Human AI Coevolution.” This new discipline examines how humans and AI evolve together, shedding light on the societal impacts—both positive and negative—that arise from this interconnected growth.

A newly published paper by 17 renowned AI experts, including Northeastern’s Ricardo Baeza-Yates,  Albert-László Barabási, Tina Eliassi-Rad, and Alessandro Vespignani, highlights the pressing need to understand and guide this coevolutionary process.

The paper is attracting significant media attention, with leading outlets such as Forbes spotlighting its insights and the urgency of addressing this evolving interplay.

Building on Northeastern’s focus on experiential AI —AI with a human in the loop—and network science, the authors propose a forward-looking framework to address and guide human-AI coevolution, ensuring its societal impacts are thoughtfully addressed.

“We are dealing with probably the most complex network that has ever been created,” Vespignani said of the feedback loop between humans and AI systems. “There is a constant exchange of information of all kinds. Understanding how those unintended consequences can affect our society is one of the major challenges that we tackle.”

“People can evolve. AI cannot evolve - it’s not biological,” Baeza-Yates adds. “But AI can be developed in a way that helps us to be better humans.”

AI technologies, such as recommender systems, are already transforming how people behave and perceive the world. These behaviors, in turn, generate data that fuel the development of the next generation of algorithms, creating a continuous and potentially endless feedback loop.

“Human-AI coevolution is already happening today. We have feedback loops in all systems that use AI that are used daily. This feedback loop is something that is not only built by us by interacting with the system, but also by the recommendations that these systems make to us that change our choices, or shape our choices.”

Watch Baeza-Yates and Vespignani discuss this groundbreaking research.