The Generative Identity Initiative: Exploring Generative AI’s Impact on Cognition, Society, and the Future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surged to the fore; its paradigm-shattering capabilities enhance everything from basic web search to medical diagnosis. Generative AI (GenAI)—which can create content, such as text, images, music, videos, or software code based on prompts or inputs—is the breakthrough technology driving many of these latest developments and use cases, some offering great potential to contribute to human flourishing. However, it is also becoming clear that GenAI represents a profound evolution in technologies that can (1) affect and manipulate cognition, and (2) outsource cognitive functions, two effects that were highlighted in the Institute for Security and Technology’s Digital Cognition and Democracy Initiative. This new phase of work, the Generative Identity Initiative (GII), builds on this foundation to explore the following inquiry: How will GenAI, particularly social conversational agents, affect social cohesion? The report is the culmination of a year-long collaboration among GII working group members and others from industry, academia, and civil society. This report is organized in two parts. The initial section lays out how working group members believe GenAI may affect social cohesion: via challenges in metacognition, the confusion of interpersonal and social trust, the erosion of the psychological components of wisdom, and the fracturing of collective memory. Thereafter, a comprehensive research agenda is presented, encompassing 27 items identified as necessary for investigation, in order to effectively address these challenges.