Jacy Reese Anthis

Date: December 8th, 2025

Time: 16:00 (CET)

Title:  Digital Minds: Human-Computer Interaction in the Era of Transformative Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: 

Many people now trust humanlike AI chatbots to write their documents, make important decisions, and listen to their personal emotions and secrets. The term “artificial intelligence,” coined 70 years ago, fails to capture the complex social roles played by these new systems. In this talk, I will show how we can make sense of them as “digital minds,” general-purpose agents that appear to think and feel. With surveys, interviews, and discourse analysis, we find that 20% of U.S. adults see some current AI as sentient, and we characterize emergent forms of human-computer interaction, such as digital companionship, with significant consequences for mental health. With AI-assisted benchmark evaluations, we quantify risks of algorithmic bias and human disempowerment. Responsible coexistence with digital minds requires acknowledging their incredible capabilities but also their fundamentaly alien nature, and AI safety will require a new field of sociotechnical research to continuously map this emergent social landscape.

About the Presenter

Jacy Reese Anthis is a computational social scientist researching human-AI interaction and machine learning. His research focuses on the emergence of “digital minds,” general-purpose AI systems that can work side-by-side with humans and appear to have reasoning, emotion, agency, and other mental faculties. His research has been published in top academic venues, such as CHI, ACL, and NeurIPS, and featured in global media outlets, such as Vox, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. Anthis has presented his work at conferences and seminars in 28 countries, and he was recently recognized as a Rising Star in Data Science. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University, a co-founder of the nonprofit Sentience Institute, and a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago.

Homepage: https://jacyanthis.com/