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Advanced AI can help people think more clearly, but it can also make it easier to accept polished answers without fully examining them. Over time, this may weaken independent judgment, responsibility, and the person’s ownership of important decisions. Phenogenesis is a human-centered research and pilot project exploring how AI interaction can support reasoning while preserving the user’s role as the author of the final conclusion. The project already has a conceptual framework, a working prototype environment, early live testing, a pilot protocol, safety boundaries, and a public project page: https://simpliotics.com/en/project-phenogenesis.html This grant will fund a six-month pilot with structured human-AI sessions, anonymized case collection, evaluation criteria, interface refinement, and a public findings report.
The pilot has four main goals: 1. Identify interaction patterns that strengthen or weaken independent human reasoning. 2. Test practical ways to preserve judgment, uncertainty awareness, and decision ownership during AI-assisted thinking. 3. Develop usable evaluation criteria for human-side AI safety. 4. Produce an initial evidence base that can support future research and institutional testing. The pilot will include approximately 20–30 participants in structured sessions. Participants will use the Phenogenesis environment for real thinking and decision tasks. The project will collect anonymized cases, review recurring patterns, refine the interaction design, and compare outcomes across different types of requests and user states. The first phase will focus on low-risk contexts. Medical, legal, financial, and irreversible decisions will remain outside the pilot. By the end of the project, the intended outputs are: - a documented pilot method; - anonymized or synthetic case examples; - practical evaluation criteria; - findings on where AI supports or displaces human judgment; - an improved working interface; - a public report with results, limitations, and next-step recommendations.
The minimum funding level is USD 50,000. This would support a compact version of the pilot with a smaller participant group, core interface work, basic analysis, anonymized case preparation, and an initial findings report. The full funding goal is USD 100,000. This would support the complete six-month pilot, including: - project leadership and full-time methodological work; - interface development and technical implementation; - participant recruitment, sessions, and compensation; - research design, evaluation criteria, and analysis; - external safety and methodological review; - English-language adaptation; - AI-assisted software development tools, including OpenAI Codex and API usage; - secure data storage and technical services; - publication of the final report and open evaluation materials. All funding will be used directly for project delivery. There is no organizational overhead.
The project is led by Vladislav Vassilyev, founder of Phenogenesis. I have more than 30 years of experience in strategy, communications, management systems, decision-making, and the development of new project categories. Much of my work has focused on how people and organizations lose clarity, create unnecessary complexity, and build or fail to build working decision systems. For Phenogenesis, I have developed the conceptual foundation, pilot architecture, participant protocol, safety boundaries, working prototype environment, budget logic, and early testing process. The project is currently founder-led. Grant funding will make it possible to bring in targeted technical, research, and external review support while keeping responsibility and methodology clearly coordinated.
The most likely risks are: - difficulty recruiting a sufficiently diverse participant group; - weak or inconsistent evidence from a small pilot; - participant responses being influenced by novelty; - the evaluation criteria proving too broad or difficult to apply; - the project attempting to answer more than a first pilot can support. These risks will be managed through a limited scope, clear pilot boundaries, repeated review of cases, transparent documentation, and explicit reporting of limitations. If the pilot does not confirm the current assumptions, the project will still produce useful negative evidence about which interaction methods do not reliably preserve human reasoning. The result would help narrow the field and improve future research design.
Phenogenesis has not raised external funding during the last 12 months. The conceptual work, prototype development, documentation, and early testing have been funded and carried out by the founder.