Special Session

Alife’s Co-adventures with Human

at ALIFE 2025
6-10 October 2025 in Kyoto, Japan

About session

This special session aims to explore artificial systems that can co-adventure with humans. Artificial systems that can co-adventure with humans are novel artificial systems that overcome the challenges when applying artificial intelligence and robots, which have emphasized intelligence and productivity improvements, to society. Conventional artificial intelligence and robots mainly assume a one-sided relationship in which humans give orders and artificial systems follow. This relationship implies that the artificial systems cannot act without orders from humans, and they remain as lifeless entities that lack autonomy. Accordingly, the application of artificial systems is limited to automation in closed environments such as factories. To expand the application of artificial systems to open environments such as daily life spaces, however, it is difficult to define environmental information and give orders in advance because various unexpected events can occur.

To solve these problems, we have an opportunity to discuss how to update the relationship between computer intelligence and humans, and how to make AI ethics, which humans have conventionally defined one-sidedly, something that arises from this relationship. Furthermore, by predicting the social changes that will arise from this new relationship, connections to industry will also be considered.

We hope to contribute to the expansion of the Alife community through discussions involving not only computer science experts, but also experts from various fields such as philosophy, psychology, ethics and law. This special session calls for such a wide range of research to address these issues and provide an opportunity for discussion.

Program

October 9th (Thursday) 14:00 – 15:30 at Room 6-A

14:00-14:05        Introduction by organizers

14:05-14:30        Keynote Lecture “Co-creative Learning: Towards a Bilateral and Organic Alignment
                        　　between Humans and AI”

                        　　Prof. Tadahiro Taniguchi

14:30-14:50        Contributed paper “Can We Tell if ChatGPT is a Parasite? Studying Human–AI Symbiosis　
                        　　with Game Theory”

                        　　Jiejun Hu-Bolz and James Stovold

14:50-15:10        Contributed paper “The Woven Mind: Ada Lovelace, Intuitive Computing, and Creative Machines”

                        　　Pei-Ying Lin and Olaf Witkowski

15:10-15:30        Contributed paper “Evolving agents to generate and falsify hypotheses of biological self-assembly”

                        　　Krishna Kannan Srinivasan, Nam Le, Joshua Bongard, and Douglas Blackiston

Keynote Lecture

Title: Co-creative Learning: Towards a Bilateral and Organic Alignment between Humans and AI

Speaker: Prof. Tadahiro Taniguchi (Kyoto University)

Abstract:

Traditional approaches to AI alignment emphasize a unilateral transfer of human knowledge and values to AI systems. This paradigm is insufficient for the emerging era of human–AI symbiosis, where influence is inherently bidirectional. This talk introduces a new framework, co-creative learning, which seeks a bilateral and organic form of alignment that emerges from continuous interaction between humans and AI.

We ground this framework in the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) hypothesis, which posits that interacting agents minimize their collective prediction error by co-creating a shared symbol system.

This process functions as a form of decentralized Bayesian inference, enabling a dyad to integrate their partial, heterogeneous perceptual information into a shared understanding that exceeds the capabilities of either agent alone.

The CPC-based theory provides a scientific foundation for building symbiotic AI systems that learn with humans, rather than merely from them. This co-creative process, driven by mutual and bottom-up interaction, offers a compelling alternative to top-down alignment methods. It paves the way for a future in which humans and AI can co-evolve and generate new knowledge together.

Call for papers

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• – Social Interaction between Humans and Artificial Systems
  　Emotion, Empathy, Cooperation and Collaboration, Theory of mind, Autopoiesis
• – Neuroscience
  　Free energy principle/Active inference, Predictive coding, Bayesian brain hypothesis
• – AI ethics
  　Values, Freedom and Responsibility, Trust, Norms
• – Self and Embodiment
  　Development, Self-differentiation, Enactivism, Sensorimotor contingency

Important dates

Submission Deadline: May 4, 2025

Submission Deadline: May 11, 2025

Paper submissions

The submission instructions and submission link are available here and select the special session, “Alife’s Co-adventures with Human”.

Please note that contributions to our special session have to be submitted through the main conference’s submission system.

Organizers

• – Kanako Esaki (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: kanako.esaki.oa[at]hitachi.com
• – Ryosuke Igarashi (Kyoto University)
  　Email: igarashi.ryousuke.7p[at]kyoto-u.ac.jp
• – Tadayuki Matsumura (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: tadayuki.matsumura.bh[at]hitachi.com
• – Yang Shao (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: yang.shao.kn[at]hitachi.com
• – Hiroyuki Mizuno (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: hiroyuki.mizuno.vp[at]hitachi.com

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