STARS - ELO (Un)linked 2024: “E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny”
Algorithms & Imaginaries 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. COinS Jul 18th, 4:45 PM Jul 18th, 5:45 PM 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. Accessibility Statement This item was created or digitized prior to April 24, 2027, or is a reproduction of legacy media created before that date. It is preserved in its original, unmodified state specifically for research, reference, or historical recordkeeping. 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