my writing Archives - Siobhan O'Flynn

June 15, 2024June 20, 2024

E-Mote AI

A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny.

Research Question:

E-Mote AI asks: What might be the effects (social, political, cultural) of the uncritical and unregulated adoption of generative AI Chatbots, assistants, and companions?

How might creating a fictional start-up company in this sector provoke questions, discussions, and critical engagement with the many concerns and benefits as they can be identified?

ESAA Gen 3. E-Mote AI 2023

E-Mote AI: An Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny is a transmedia project currently in beta utilizing the methodologies of speculative futures and critical design to explore the emergent logics, industry practices, and implications of the rush to bring to market AI mental wellness apps, assistants, companions. This project situates today’s chatbots in a continuum of automata such as the 18th century automaton, the Mechanical Turk (Ashford, 2017)) and responses to automata & AI via Joseph Weizenbaum’s caution on the “powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” he observed in responses to Doctor, the Eliza Chatbot (Weizenbaum, 1967, p.7). The website for E-Mote AI is designed to simulate a mental wellness start-up launching customizable and personalized AI ChatBots for education, industry & HR. The text uses the marketing copy style churned out by ChatGPT to replicate the aspirational claims common in this sector, here generated by me through multiple revisions and curations of my prompts. The AI generated text cascades in euphorically hollow metaphors and stylistic flourishes, absent of any evidence in peer-reviewed medical studies or vetted journals. The project is designed for a general audience and not specialists in fields such as STS, critical code studies, digital humanities, or digital media studies.

E-Mote AI targets sectors rapidly shifting to AI as more efficient and less costly than “humane work” and “connective labor” (Pugh, 2022), with two iterations of ESAA, the Employee Sentiment Analysis Assistant and ESAA, the Empathetic Student Anxiety Assistant. The website includes simulated video avatars, generated through cross-posting output between Midjourney and LivingAI when it was available on ChatGPT4. The copy for the videos was scripted by me.

My intention is for users to experience E-Mote AI as a provocation to what is now becoming our status quo, now with the race for data for Large Language Models (LLMs) from OpenAI to Siri. The concept and design draw on methodologies from speculative critical design (Bratton, 2016; Dunne and Raby, 2013; Haraway, 2011; Jain, 2019; Candy and Watson, 2013) in order to simulate an encounter with AI Chatbots that invite intimacy that are designed to quell uneasiness. while simultaneously (hopefully) raising uneasiness. Dunne and Raby set out the value of critical design in their work Speculative Everything, in a passage worth quoting in full:

Design as critique can do many things—pose questions, encourage thought, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate, raise awareness, offer new perspectives, and inspire. And even to entertain in an intellectual sort of way. But what is excellence in critical design? Is it subtlety, originality of topic, the handling of a question? Or something more functional such as its impact or its power to make people think? Should it even be measured or evaluated? It’s not a science after all and does not claim to be the best or most effective way of raising issues.

Critical design might borrow heavily from art’s methods and approaches but that is it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday; that’s where its power to disturb lies. A critical design should be demanding, challenging, and if it is going to raise awareness, do so for issues that are not already well known. Safe ideas will not linger in people’s minds or challenge prevailing views but if it is too weird, it will be dismissed as art, and if too normal, it will be effortlessly assimilated. If it is labeled as art it is easier to deal with but if it remains design, it is more disturbing; it suggests that the everyday life as we know it could be different, that things could change.

For us, a key feature is how well it simultaneously sits in this world, the here-and-now, while belonging to another yet-to-exist one. It proposes an alternative that through its lack of fit with this world offers a critique by asking, “why not?” If it sits too comfortably in one or the other it fails. That is why for us, critical designs need to be made physical. (2012, p. 43)

E-Mote AI is meant to “[sit] in this world, the here-and-now,” of today’s online environment and the AI tools and services that obfuscate the data capture propelled by for-profit goals. The irony of the design of E-Mote AI is that the advances in AI and acceleration of adoption now mean that this project is a present reality, though not yet widely understood, as the potential ramifications are unrecognized and often ill-defined.

Rather than aiming for a seamlessly palatable experience, my hope is that the repetitive hyperbole of the grandiose style paired with the occasional glitches can raise user concerns, drawing attention to cracks in the superficiality of understanding of AI Chatbots. Further, I hope that the frustrations experienced in encounters with the bespoke Poe Bot will serve as reminders of the lack of interpretability of the computational processes determining the output, while also providing indicators to gauge the limits and guardrails present in the coding, trackable in what is and isn’t recognized, and the algorithmic biases that may appear. Where the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix, visualized this as freezes and glitches in the VR simulation, and the dramatic green cascades of computer code, today’s encounters materialize as friendly assistants on our devices, in our infrastructures, networks, and any system that is functionally reliant on algorithmic processes and decisions.

I choose this sector of AI development to highlight the logics of existing AI Chatbots (Pi, Replika, Woebot, Poe, KintsugiHealth), and services and as a provocation to encourage discussion, examination, and optimally, regulation, of what Zuboff has termed “the instrumentalization of data” (2019) now being mined from personal, intimate, and therapeutic realms. The rush to capitalize this new frontier of data is significantly unregulated, largely operating outside of the FDA in the US, and current and proposed AIDA regulation in Canada. Companies such as such as Calm and Woebot (apps), KintsugiHealth and Supermanage (sentiment analysis via HR & Slack respectively) all bypass the much more expensive, time consuming and heavily regulated requirements for mental health apps and services.

KintsugiHealth is of particular concern in that the AI analyzes audio biomarkers at increments too fine for human perception to enable early interventions pre-crisis, self-designate as mental wellness services. As Zuboff has warned, these new industries of data capture and knowledge production are fundamentally political: “The result is that these new knowledge territories become the subject of political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” The second is about authority: “Who decides who knows?” The third is about power: “Who decides who decides who knows?” (Naughton, 2019).

The proliferation of intimate data harvesting technologies such as these should be framed as a rights issue ensuring the user / client /employee’s agency to decide whether to opt-in or not as to data collection and processing. Further, full transparency and accountability as to data use, third party sharing, internal and external data audits, must be in place as we are entering into a period of mass scale social experiment run by for-profits without ethical oversight.

E-Mote AI is designed to consider the short and long-term implications of algorithmic therapists and companions, drawing on insights from Dr. Esther Perel has warned of the socio-cultural dangers of the “other AI in artificial intimacy” (TEDTalk, 2023). The intention of this project is not just to prompt despair and apathy at a rapidly approaching dystopian near-future, instead my goal is to emphasize our capacity to choose differently. Dunne and Raby outline the importance of “critical design” as an optimistic intervention towards better futures, writing: “All good critical design offers an alternative to how things are. It is the gap between reality as we know it and the different idea of reality referred to in the critical design proposal that creates the space for discussion. It depends on dialectical opposition between fiction and reality to have an effect. Critical design uses commentary but it is only one layer of many” (2013, p. 35). E-Mote AI embodies the “shiny thing” effect characteristic of generative AI tools and services as the wonder machines of our age. Hopefully, users are not lulled, wooed, and distracted, and instead might pause to consider the implications and questions raised by today’s cyber automata.

ESAA Gen 11 BDX. E-Mote AI 2024

Works Cited

Ashford, D. (2017). The Mechanical Turk: Enduring Misapprehensions Concerning Artificial Intelligence. The Cambridge Quarterly, 46(2), 119-139.

https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfx005

Bratton, B. H. (2016). On Speculative Design. Dis Magazine. February.

http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81971/on-speculative-design-benjamin-h-bratton/. Accessed 10 August 2019.

Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press.

Candy, S., and Watson, J. (2013-ongoing). The Situation Lab. https://situationlab.org/.

Accessed 2013.

Calm. Accessed 2017. https://www.calm.com/

Dunne, A., and Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.

Haraway, D. (2011) Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country. Australian Humanities Review, no. 50, 2011.

https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2011/05/01/speculative-fabulations-for-technoculturesgenerations-taking-care-of-unexpected-country/.

Accessed 12 June 2013.

Inflection AI, Inc. (2023). Pi.AI https://pi.ai/talk Accessed May 5 2023.

Jain, A. (2019). Calling for a more-than-human politics: A field guide that can help us move towards the practice of a more-than-human politics. Superflux.

Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics

Accessed 17 September 2021.

Kintsugi Mindful Wellness, Inc. (2022). Kintsugi. https://www.kintsugihealth.com/ Accessed November 12, 2022.

Loveless, N. (2019). How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research- Creation. Duke University Press.

Naughton, J. (2019). The Goal is to Automate Us: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Guardian. Sunday 20 January. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook Accessed January 20 2019.

Perel, E. (2023). Esther Perel on The Other AI: Artificial Intimacy | SXSW 2023. March 31.

ttps://youtu.be/vSF-Al45hQU?si=WFvJOy7pnzWu0x5a Accessed April 9, 2023.

Poe…COMPLETE

Pugh, A.J. (2022). Constructing What Counts as Human Work: Enigma, Emotion, and Error in Connective Labor. American Behavioural Scientist. Vol. 67.14. Accessed Nov. 18, 2023.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221127240

Replika…COMPLETE

Supermanage….COMPLETE

Wachowski, L., & Wachowski, L. (1999). The Matrix. Warner Bros.

Weizenbaum, J. (1967). Contextual understanding by computers. Communications of the ACM, 10(8). http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1967.pdf

Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.

Woebot Health (2017). Woebot. https://woebothealth.com/ Accessed Oct. 14 2022.

Zuboff, S. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books.

March 4, 2014March 8, 2014

JJ Abrams’ Mystery Box Playing Cards… Collectibles? Snake Oil?

I got very very excited about this one as my first thought was that maybe this would be a new card game, designed from the ground up.

I was thinking a unique set of rules, with maybe the cards as a set of ‘game’ prompts, with themes, characters, actions, events, outcomes… something like what Jeff Watson created for his PhD Dissertation, Reality Ends Here.

In Jeff Watson’s collaborative media-making game, the cards act as prompts to collaborative creative multi-media productions, staged on the campus of USC:

“Reality is a collaborative media-making game for 10 or more players. It is not a single-sitting game, but rather a long-term experience. Depending on how you want to run it, a “season” of Reality can last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months or longer. It is not a game like Monopoly or Senet or Tag or Mario Kart. If anything, it’s more like a miniature sporting league, where the sport involves media-making, socializing, strategy, and team-building, and where the teams are impermanent, forming and dissolving on a project-by-project basis.”

JJ Abrams’ Mystery Cards, however, appear to be just that – ordinary playing with layers of collectible packaging.

As Abrams’ TED Talk Mystery Box famously defined, sometimes you don’t want to know what’s inside the box because what you imagined was infinitely more exciting. The cards, pointedly, come wrapped & sealed so you have to decide whether to violate the packaging & reveal the deck within

Abrams has given hard core fans the opportunity to now buy their own mystery box, with 12 decks for the substantial cost of $149 US.

Even though Abrams is shunting $1 per deck to 826 National, a literacy initiated started by Dave Eggers in San Francisco (which I love), I can’t see myself rushing to buy the deck or the box.

There is no mystery, rather what we might think of as a simulation/simulacra of mystery, given that there is no creative value in the cards themselves. I was really hoping for something much more engaging like the brand new futurist object generating card game I played yesterday, The Thing from the Future.

Designed by Jeff Watson and Stuart Candy, The Situation Lab OCAD University, for an event co-hosted with New York’s Extrapolation Factory, this card game, designed as a set of prompts, was a highly creative, engaging collaborative experience.

At the end of the day, we had generated hundreds if not thousands of future scenarios and possible objects, and created a selection of physical objects which are now available in a vending machine from the future at OCAD University.

That’s mine in the top centre, the red one…

In contrast, Abrams’ Mystery cards are all package, faux mystery, and, honestly? very polished snake oil. Not buying here

December 7, 2013December 15, 2013

Brilliant! 13 Doctors face off against… 13 Doctors! Dr Who / Hunger Games Parody

November 23, 2013December 9, 2013

Fan Activism: HPA creates Fantastic Activist Tumblr Campaign with We Are The Districts

Again, props to The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) for acting on Suzanne Collin’s critique of social inequalities that define The Hunger Games dystopian world and for taking fan activism out into the world again. Looking through the posts, HPA has partnered with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and members are posting pics of their three-fingered salutes!

HPA defines the goals of We are the Districts as

And HPA has created a set of badges representing key social concerns

I love HPA. Thank you. You can check it out here:

http://wearethedistricts.tumblr.com/

November 23, 2013December 14, 2013

The Harry Potter Alliance Launches New Fan Site: Odds In Our Favor ‘Taking back the narrative’ of Catching Fire

Thank you HPA for kickstarting a campaign to counter the crass commercialism of Lionsgate’s marketing campaign for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire!

From the new site:

“Who controls the narrative? The rich and powerful tell us that if we put our heads down and work hard, we can overcome the odds and join the ranks of the victors — the wealthy and privileged few. However, it’s increasingly clear that the game is rigged, and that we have an important role to play: At best, we are the loyal consumers. At worst, we are the ones who slip through the cracks.

And that’s why we’re taking back the narrative. The Hunger Games explores numerous themes that are relevant to the imbalances that exist in our world. In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen solidifies her role as a symbol for change and sets the resistance in motion. Thus, the release of the Catching Fire film represents a perfect opportunity to establish a dialogue about our own problems and set the wheels in motion for positive change. Instead, Catching Fire is being used as an opportunity to sell makeup and fast-food sandwiches.

And we have a very simple response to that: Not on our watch…”

Fans are posting selfies with the three finger salute – love this!

you can join here:

http://oddsinourfavor.org/

August 30, 2013December 15, 2013

You have to Love Lionsgate’s Commitment to the Dark Side: Catching Fire’s Misfired Marketing…

With November 22 now 2 months & 22 days away, you have to love Lionsgate’s commitment to marketing the vacuous superficial lifestyle of the Capitol Panem, which if you’ve read The Hunger Games Trilogy, you know is functionally a hyped up runway version of the Death Star.

Cover Girl’s commercial above proclaims: ’12 districts . 12 looks. 1 collection’ – Hurray! no mention of brutality & deaths here!

Check out the Capitol Couture Tumblr page which has just launched its fall fashion issue, glamourizing the first of many could-be or soon-to-be-dead ‘stars’ of the games.

If you know Johanna’s story, you know that because of her choices (won’t say what), her loved ones are killed in retaliation. And that she is tortured at a later point… won’t go into details.

Yet meanwhile over on Capitol Couture we have this fashion mag blurb. The last line seems pointedly weird given that Collins’ makes the lack of agency and control the Tributes have over their bodies such a key theme of the series: ‘During make up, Mason doesn’t fidget as her artist adheres three-inch eyelashes to her lower…’

In The Hunger Games, Cinna warns Katniss not to resist & to do everything that her stylists want her to do. The implication is pretty clear that to resist is to risk extreme punishment or death, perhaps not one’s own death, but one’s loved ones potentially.

Check out the glamourized pic of Mags below & the accompanying text which also misreads the works, as Collins via Katniss is explicit in her presentation of Panem as a society that eschews aging, preferring extreme plastic surgery and thinness in a rejection of ‘aging with dignity and grace.’

That we have a ratings score on pout is a bit of an obscenity, to be blunt.

I continue to be mystified by Lionsgate’s focus on the Capitol in promoting the film. In the lead up to the launch of The Hunger Games, Lionsgate & China Glaze teamed up with the Capitol Colours, with a line of 12 colours, one for each district and fantastic polish names like Foie Gras, Agro, Smoke and Ashes…

One blogger posted a breakdown of the colours in the spirit of Capitol Couture here with enticing yet paradoxical descriptions such as:

‘Smoke & Ashes (District 12- Mining): Even though I’m not typically drawn to black nail polishes, I had to have this one (the fact that it is district 12’s color and I may or may not be in love with 2 of district 12’s leading men may have something to do with this). The finely milled glitter flecks found in Smoke & Ashes are a mixture of blue, green, silver and purple, making this polish resemble the night sky – OBSESSED!’

Yes, indeed, paradoxical as the smoke and ashes are increasingly unpleasant as the series continues. The decision to market cosmetics to promote the film was fabulously expressed by Tim Palen, Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer, who said:

“Having a nail polish for the rabid young girl fan base to relate to our movie on a personal level feels smart.”

Monica Corcoran Harel quoted Palen in a biting article in NY Times in March 2012, ‘Forget the Plot. What Nail Polish Is She Wearing?‘ and her criticism is just as valid in the push to the second film as it was in the first:

“…[because] the film’s characters are too busy murdering each other to get manicures, the nail polishes are sold as products worn by the extras…”

Fans over at The Hunger But Mostly Death Games, thankfully, parodied the marketing campaign, launching their own line of nail polish, with colours replicating the pus oozing tracker jacker stings that kill Glimmer and numerous other brutal details of Collins’ series.

So here we go again, now with major ads out in Vogue & other magazines, this time with Cover Girl partnering. Now you have to admire an ad that so blatantly promotes the Capitol in Cover Girl’s enthusiastic endorsement of Panem: ‘Coming to the Capitol this Fall’!

So in the fictional world of The Hunger Games, Cover Girl is then the make-up of choice of the stylists who handle the body modifications & glamourizing of those 24 Tributes, 23 of whom will die? Surely, someone in house has read the book or has a son or daughter who has read the series!

“Capitol Fashionistas have a very big reason to look forward to autumn. Just announced, a premiere line of beauty products brought to you by the perennial COVERGIRL — The Capitol Collection — will soon arrive to glam the glamorous. This Collection promises to inspire a new era of expressive beauty through make-up. Keep tabs on Capitol Couture for exclusive reveals and get ready to discover a new ‘you’ this fall.”

What oh what will this marketing campaign do next? It’s very deja vu to revisit my case study on the campaign for the first film, here, and see exactly the same problematic choices being replayed. Given how dark this series is, you really don’t want to be on the Dark Side. And the Dark Side doesn’t fare well in the end either.

The comments on Cover Girl’s commercial are predominantly critical:

‘any one feel a little bit scared out now’

‘To agree with them others: When this came on TV… I nearly shat nightlock’

‘Btw I’ve got nothing against people who like/use lots of makeup – but to do a promotion around this?!? *shakes head*’

Even the raves show tinges of guilt at buying in to the commercial sell:

‘Does it make me a crazy district 1 person if I am like.. super excited to waste my money and buy all of it? Because.. I am.’

So…. yet again, I’m hanging in to see how long it’s going to take for Lionsgate to shift the focus from the unequivocally evil Panem to the counter forces that Katniss represents. Seriously. What is Lionsgate going to do for The Mockingjay??? Promote a make-up line for civil war? for terrorism? Seriously.