The As-If Machine: Personalized counterfactuals make distant policy risks feel close
Read the original on arXiv AI →The As-If Machine (AIM) is a multi‑agent AI system that lets participants co‑write personalized counterfactual narratives about their own lives under different policy futures. In two large experiments—one on science funding and one on satellite cybersecurity—AIM significantly increased participants’ psychological closeness to the risks compared with expert vignettes and unrelated writing, with effects ranging from 0.36 to 0.90 standard deviations. Across 23,496 human‑AI interactions, AIM provided concrete detail while participants supplied first‑person perspective and emotion, demonstrating that co‑writing with AI can make distant policy risks feel immediate and personal.
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