Hyborg Agency: Fostering AI Agents through Community Conversations in a Digital Forest

This paper presents Hyborg Agency, a computational ecosystem that explores how AI agents can meaningfully coexist with human society through the metaphor of a digital forest. By reimagining AI agents as mechanical deer, mutated from discarded electronics, the project defamiliarizes common perceptions of anthropomorphized AI agents, transforming them into non-human creatures with conversational abilities. The system employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to process community conversations, treating them as nutrients for AI growth, and features a dual-platform structure that connects an immersive 3D environment with Discord, a widely used communication platform. Based on community chats, Hyborgs generate daily summaries of their observations and share them with one another, fostering consistent memories and perceptions of the world. Through thematic analysis of public exhibitions and structured interviews with fourteen experts (seven pairs), we identified three key themes: social expansion in human relationships, language evolution through code-infused communication, and creative engagement through defamiliarized interaction. These findings highlight how AI agents can enrich human social relationships while maintaining transparency about their artificial nature. This work contributes to ongoing discussions on AI participation in society through a speculative scenario: human discourse serves as the foundation for constructing a digital forest that nurtures AI agents. In this virtual forest, humans and AI grow together in a symbiotic relationship, shaping one another and their shared environment, ultimately achieving harmonious coexistence.