Social AI:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a single entity, it comes in many guises. These guises are not fixed nor are they visible. At times, human-AI interactions make it appear subservient, symbiotically attuned to our needs, like a virtual assistant making a booking at a restaurant. At other times, it may appear punitive like a Robodebt collector. Despite its opaque nature, most of us are in some way interacting with AI on a daily basis.

The European Commission’s White Paper on AI, defines Artificial Intelligence as:

Systems that display intelligent behaviour by analysing their environment and taking actions – with some degree of autonomy – to achieve specific goals. AI-based systems can be purely software-based, acting in the virtual world (e.g. voice assistants, image analysis software, search engines, speech
and face recognition systems) or AI can be embedded in hardware devices (e.g. advanced robots, autonomous cars, drones or Internet of Things applications).

Forms of AI driven technology, capable of interpersonal communication such as Chatbots and voice enabled digital assistants are being rapidly integrated into the human social world due largely to advancement in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) technologies (two subfields of AI), and the attribution of anthropomorphic features such as their increasingly sophisticated ability to converse, either via text or speech.

The ubiquity of these technologies is evidenced by the prediction that that by 2021, there will be more voice enabled Digital Social Assistants (DSAs) on the planet than people (De Renesse 2017). Despite the rapid uptake of these technologies, how much do we know about their inner machinations?

The field of Human-Machine Communication (HMC), views these digital interlocutors as messengers as opposed to message sources, as an emerging subset of communication studies it is focused ‘on the meaning that is created in interactions between people and technology and the implications for individuals and society’ (Guzman, 2018), and as such provides a theoretical base from which to examine the meaning that is made during a conversational interaction with a DSA.

The ‘In Conversation with AI’ website is host to reflections and audio experiments accumulated during research for a Practice Based Research Masters of Design project of the same name, which aims to examine the power differential between human-AI interactions as demonstrated through conversational interactions with two distinctly different DSAs, Apple’s voice enabled digital assistant Siri and Replika.AI, the text based Chatbot ‘who cares’.

Using mixed methods, including a survey of academic literature from the field of Human-Machine Communication and analysis of conversations with social AI, this project aims to deconstruct some of the salient myths about Human-AI interactions as perpetuated by the technology’s design and by doing so, will attempt to render visible some of the complex cultural and technological layers underpinning even the simplest human-AI interaction.

The audio samples in each section represent one component of the research, together, they can be interpreted as part AI creation myth, part explication of the technology involved in the creation of DSAs with exception of Gina’s story, a true story about a voice artist who was unwittingly commodified in the production cycle of a digital assistant.








References:

The European Commission, White Paper on Artificial Intelligence - A European approach to excellence and trust, https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/commission-white-paper-artificial-intelligence-feb2020_en.pdf. Viewed 10/11/2020.

Ronan De Renesse, Virtual Digital Assistants to Overtake World Population by 2021, Ovum, May 17, 2017, https://ovum.informa.com/resources/product-content/virtual-digital

Guzman, Andrea L, and Seth C Lewis. Artificial Intelligence and Communication: A Human–Machine Communication Research Agenda. “New media & Society 22.1 (2020) p.70-86

Guzman, Andrea L, What is human-machine communication, anyway? (2018) In: Guzman AL (ed.) Human-Machine Communication: Rethinking Communication, Technology, and Ourselves. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 1–28.