Date: April 17, 2026
Speaker: Nori Jacoby, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Cornell University
Title: Studying Human–AI Hybrid Societies through Large-Scale Experiments Involving Humans and AI Agents
Abstract: We live in an increasingly hybrid society in which culture and ideas are shaped by both humans and by generative AI. Yet AI systems are being deployed at great speed without a clear understanding of their collective and aggregate consequences for domains that were previously governed primarily by humans, from open-source coding to creative writing. What kinds of hybrid societies will emerge from human–AI interaction? Under what conditions can human–AI collaboration flourish? And what role will humans play in these emerging collectives?
To address these questions, I use large-scale social network experiments that integrate real human participants with machine learning agents. I will present three case studies examining human–AI collaboration in creative search, open-ended creative writing, and team-based vibe coding. Our results provide empirical evidence that both humans and AI agents change their behaviour through mutual interaction, and that these changes have complex, non-linear effects on collective performance and the diversity of outcomes. Strikingly, misalignment between humans and AI, often seen as a limitation, can generate a synergistic effect in which hybrid collectives outperform homogeneous groups composed solely of humans or of AI agents. In this sense, human–AI misalignment can be understood not simply as a problem to be eliminated, but as a potentially productive feature of hybrid societies, one that can enhance individual contribution while preserving collective diversity.
Bio: Nori Jacoby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His lab studies how AI agents can shape human creativity in music, writing, and code through large-scale online experiments in which humans interact with AI agents in experimental social networks. He completed his PhD at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Naftali Tishby and Merav Ahissar. He then held postdoctoral positions in Josh McDermott’s Computational Audition Lab at MIT, Tom Griffiths’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab at UC Berkeley, and as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. Before joining Cornell, Jacoby was a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main.