“E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny”
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 4:45 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 5:45 PM
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Abstract
“E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny” explores the emergent logics, industry practices, and dystopian implications of the rush to market of AI mental-wellness apps, assistants, companions. This paper situates today’s Chatbots remembering Joseph Weizenbaum’s caution as to “the Eliza effect” and the “powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” (6) responding to Doctor, the Eliza Chatbot, and what Dr. Esther Perel terms the socio-cultural dangers of the "other AI, Artificial Intimacy.”
The ongoing speculative critical design project discussed imagines a fictional AI Wellness Start-Up, E-Mote AI offering customizable AI Assistants, ESAA, your “Employee Sentiment Analysis Assistant,” and ESAA2, your “Empathetic Student Anxiety Assistant,” pitched with AI-generated enthusiasm as: “E-MoteAI transforms what was a dark sky of inaccessible data into emotional constellations.”
Speculative critical design methodologies (Dunne and Raby) inform this expanding transmedia storyworld (website, Twine, ChatBot, AR), built as a provocation to raise awareness of the dangers of profit-driven innovation defining today’s social imaginaries (Benjamin) and what Shoshana Zuboff has termed the “instrumentalization of data,” now scraping therapeutic online interactions. The rush to capitalize this new frontier of intimate data is largely unregulated, as demonstrated by mental wellness apps, Calm and Woebot, and KintsugiHealth, the latter analyzing audio biomarkers at increments too fine for human perception to prompt early interventions pre-crisis. All three are unapproved by the FDA (US).
As we grapple with these seismic societal shifts, speculative critical design can challenge the logics of “technochauvinism” (Broussard) and “hetero-patriarchal, petro-capitalist, settler-colonial [extractive] structures” (Loveless). This paper urges reflection on AI as Artificial Unintelligence, interrogation of Generative AI output for glitches that reveal algorithmic processing, and strategizing to envision better futures.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019.
Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press, 2018.
Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, 2013.
Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press, 2019.
Perel, Esther. “Esther Perel on The Other AI: Artificial Intimacy | SXSW 2023.” YouTube. 31 March, 2023.
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer power and human reason: From judgement to calculation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2018.
Recommended Citation
O'Flynn, Siobhan and O'Flynn, Siobhan, "“E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny”" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 36.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/36
“E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny”
Algorithms & Imaginaries
“E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny” explores the emergent logics, industry practices, and dystopian implications of the rush to market of AI mental-wellness apps, assistants, companions. This paper situates today’s Chatbots remembering Joseph Weizenbaum’s caution as to “the Eliza effect” and the “powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” (6) responding to Doctor, the Eliza Chatbot, and what Dr. Esther Perel terms the socio-cultural dangers of the "other AI, Artificial Intimacy.”
The ongoing speculative critical design project discussed imagines a fictional AI Wellness Start-Up, E-Mote AI offering customizable AI Assistants, ESAA, your “Employee Sentiment Analysis Assistant,” and ESAA2, your “Empathetic Student Anxiety Assistant,” pitched with AI-generated enthusiasm as: “E-MoteAI transforms what was a dark sky of inaccessible data into emotional constellations.”
Speculative critical design methodologies (Dunne and Raby) inform this expanding transmedia storyworld (website, Twine, ChatBot, AR), built as a provocation to raise awareness of the dangers of profit-driven innovation defining today’s social imaginaries (Benjamin) and what Shoshana Zuboff has termed the “instrumentalization of data,” now scraping therapeutic online interactions. The rush to capitalize this new frontier of intimate data is largely unregulated, as demonstrated by mental wellness apps, Calm and Woebot, and KintsugiHealth, the latter analyzing audio biomarkers at increments too fine for human perception to prompt early interventions pre-crisis. All three are unapproved by the FDA (US).
As we grapple with these seismic societal shifts, speculative critical design can challenge the logics of “technochauvinism” (Broussard) and “hetero-patriarchal, petro-capitalist, settler-colonial [extractive] structures” (Loveless). This paper urges reflection on AI as Artificial Unintelligence, interrogation of Generative AI output for glitches that reveal algorithmic processing, and strategizing to envision better futures.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019.
Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press, 2018.
Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, 2013.
Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press, 2019.
Perel, Esther. “Esther Perel on The Other AI: Artificial Intimacy | SXSW 2023.” YouTube. 31 March, 2023.
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer power and human reason: From judgement to calculation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2018.
Bio
Siobhan O’Flynn
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream and Interim Director, Canadian Studies Program, University of Toronto.
s.oflynn@utoronto.ca
http://siobhanoflynn.com/
Bio: Siobhan O’Flynn is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and Interim Director, Canadian Studies Program, University College, University of Toronto. Recent projects explore the expressive and unruly potential of AI image and text generators for elegy, memory, and recursive storytelling (a Twine visual novel Infinity +1 and Infinite Eddies) at the British Library MixConference 2023), and speculative critical design as a provocation to interrogate the logics of the hetero-patriarchal, petro-capitalist technochauvinism. She is a member of the Decameron Collective, exhibiting the VR experience, Memory Eternal (ELO 2023) and Decameron 2.0 (ELO 2022). Project website: E-Mote AI .