Bots with an Attitude: Designing Ethical Creative Intelligence for Collaborative Communities
Description
An exploration of a collaborative tool that integrates intelligent, ethical bots into chat environments to enhance knowledge sharing and redefine human-machine relationships.
Summary
This article presents Jan Hein Hoogstad's project "Bots with an Attitude," which challenges conventional narratives about AI by proposing a practical reimagining of human-technology collaboration. Rather than positioning AI as a threat, the project introduces intelligent agents into a chat environment where bots and humans participate as equal community members. These bots are designed to perform specific tasks—acquiring, cleaning, analyzing, evaluating, and presenting data—to structure information flow and enhance collective knowledge sharing. The project redefines artificial intelligence as "ethical creative intelligence," emphasizing agents that generate relevant insights, combine information meaningfully, and respect community values. The initiative addresses a practical need for loosely-knitted communities like planet B, which struggle with continuous knowledge sharing across rotating participants. By implementing bots as active community participants rather than passive service tools, the project demonstrates that intelligent systems can support human collaboration without replacing human agency. The bots can assist with tasks like curating relevant hashtags or mapping information from shared links, while their presence in the conversation literally brings AI into the collaborative process as an equal participant.