This Started as a Family Conversation

The Artificiality Institute helps people stay human in the age of AI. We explore how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to be human. We believe AI shouldn't just be safe or efficient—it should be worth it. Through research, education, design, and community, we help people choose the relationship they want with machines—so they remain the authors of their own minds.

For ourselves, we aim to be:

• Researchers grounded in deep, felt, authentic human experience—tracking what actually happens to people as AI becomes more powerful and more integrated with our thinking

• Authors of a practical design philosophy—Minds for Our Minds—that product designers can work from, so human-first AI shows up in real products, not just in principle

• Eventually, funders of the alternative itself: design fellowships, and in time a working design lab in Bend, Oregon

For the world, we strive for:

• Millions of people who use AI consciously and remain the authors of their own minds

• What makes us human staying alive in practice: judgment, taste, tacit knowledge, doubt, lived experience, accountability to each other, meaning made within a finite life

• Demand becoming the force: enough people asking for human-first AI that the market has to answer

This is why our work looks the way it does—research, design experiments, gatherings, teaching, publishing. Our backgrounds run through evolution and cognition, social science, the humanities, and design, and they all point to the same thing: humans have never adapted to new minds through technology alone. We co-evolve through culture and culture is something we make. We intend to make it deliberately, together.

Our name and our words are chosen deliberately. We say synthetic because that is what the world is becoming—minds, words, and relationships that are made, and that now live inside ordinary human experience rather than alongside it. We say diverse intelligences because our lineage is evolutionary: intelligence has never come in only one form, and anyone who has loved a dog knows you can be a team with a mind unlike your own. We say awe and wonder because they are the alternative to the two easy stances toward AI—worship and fear. Awe keeps you curious about a different kind of mind without handing yourself over to it. And we say minds for our minds because these systems are built things, and what is built can be designed—for us, for meaning, for the length of a human life.

Our Mission and Vision:

• Mission: To shape the emerging human experience in an increasingly synthetic world through research, education people can be certified in, and cultural dialogue.

• Vision: A world where human identity is enriched by awe of diverse intelligences, wonder at intelligence emerging, and symbiosis with minds created for our minds.

How we use AI

On working with it: We use AI in nearly everything we do—research, analysis, coding, writing. Much of our work could not exist without it. Every piece carries our names and our full accountability: we made it, we stand behind it, and we can tell you exactly how the machine was involved.

We know how that sits next to what we study. We track what AI erodes in human thinking, and we use it every day. We think you can't do one without the other. Conscious use is the practice we teach, so it has to be the practice we live—in public, on the record, where you can check.

One line we've drawn: since September 2014, we haven't used image or video generators. We can't find authorship in them—too little of the creative act stays in our hands. Others may find it there, and the tools will change. For now, anything visual here was made by a person.

People sometimes run our writing through AI detectors. We understand the anxiety—it belongs to this moment. We're working on a longer timescale: humans and these systems shaping each other for generations.

On what our work is made from: AI is trained on human work, mostly taken without asking. We publish anyway, knowing our words feed the machines too. What we push for is a future where newly human-made work keeps its human value—where the people who write, draw, and think are paid and named, and feeding the machine is a choice, not a condition of being online. How that gets built is an open question. That it must be built is not.

On what it costs: AI runs on data centers, and data centers run on power, water, and land—often someone else's. We come from the energy world; we don't wave this away with efficiency promises, and we don't inflate it either—an AI query costs a fraction of what streaming video does, and honest accounting matters in both directions. But the real choice is architectural. One of our deepest design principles is the edge: AI that is private and efficient, running close to you, over AI that is frontier and greedy, running on ever-larger machines somewhere else. Minds for our minds shouldn't require a power plant each.

On jobs: We know from all of human history that a society of people without purpose is a society in trouble. Work is where most people find a large part of theirs. So we say it explicitly: we want AI that creates more purposeful jobs, and we want the jobs that remain to be more human—more judgment, more craft, more of what only a person can bring—because AI took the rest. Human-enhancing is the test. If a deployment makes work emptier for the people doing it, it fails, whatever it saves.

The Artificiality Institute is a nonprofit organization recognized as tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.