Future Flourish: An Open Invitation to Construct the Virtual Commons, an LLM for Well-Being Scholarship

Massive advances in both computing power and artificial intelligence (AI) sophistication afford us a new opportunity to make positive psychology and well-being scholarship accessible to the world. The opening of the public consciousness to AI in the form of chatbots like Bing, Bard, and GPT-4 places well-being scholarship at a critical crossroads: either we will construct our own, curated, walled garden of knowledge or we will allow that knowledge to be mixed with all other internet content and presented as fact by generic chatbots. This paper proposes a framework for constructing an AI-powered knowledge base for well-being science and application only, called ARYA. This tool will be capable of synthesizing information from well-being scholarship across the globe. This paper examines the criteria for making ARYA positive in intent, positive in experience, positive in effect, academically valid, and culturally competent. The paper identifies intended audiences, proposes a crowd-sourced curation structure, evaluates the shortcomings of the current generation of AIs, and provides an example of the envisioned ARYA experience.