Exploratory Research

Where are the humans in AI? is the central theme of the research. I started to brainstorm on social interaction topics regarding humans and artificial intelligence. I categorized insights into four themes:

• Poetic/ Lyricism — Does AI understands metaphors or symbols?

• Social Status/ Hierarchy — Often, AI is called an assistant. Does the AI world have social status or hierarchy?

• Manners/Traditions — While the younger generations spend more time with machines and AI, they might lose contact with human intelligence, culture, and roots. Moreover, to see the importance of daily manners and etiquette.

• Emotional Quotient/Intelligent Quotient/Adversity Quotient — While humans do not value EQ and IQ equally, how does AI see each's importance?

Discussion

I joined the humans and AI discussion, regarding ethics, machine learning, data, and interactions, on the Carnegie Mellon University campus. Below are speakers' insights that influenced my design:

• Human have qualities like multi-dimensional human trust, emotional, and the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, feelings, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others, and to understand others' are different from one's own (Theory of Mind)

• Technology should not be us when it cannot be explained

• There's a difference between behavioral data on human action & mind (technology like facial recognition to define mood ) vs. data

Design Principles

With a critically informed stance in AI topics, I defined my design principles.  

Scoping The Problem

I decided to dive into AI topics related to metaphors/lyricism and Emotional Intelligence. I asked myself questions:

• What does an AI written poem look like?

• If there's a group of AI assistants in the same space, what would the social hierarchy be like?

• Why is the AI portray in our daily life mostly female? like Alexa

• What would the world be like if AI helps humans develop different intelligence forms and test them in different ways?

• When humans go to an AI bar, what are the humans feeling? How does stress, sadness, happiness plays in the scenario?

• What might integrating social metaphor in environments look like?

Human Behavior Analysis

Human's solution when facing difficult situation: conversations → decision → Reaction

Q: Why do we choose to have conversations with friends and family?

A: Because of the trust we built, the experiences we had, and the context we already know about each other

Q: How do we trust AI? How does AI understand what's going on with my life?

A: AI gets data about my life through facebook — how often I check others' social media. It gets my behavioral data based on how often I engage with a subject.

Defining The Problem

Communicating intangible emotions is challenging between people—even more so with AI. What if humans’ could communicate with AI in humans terms, using metaphors, poems, and phrases to understand one and another contextually?

Case Studies On Languages and Expressions

I researched and explored different expressive terms to communicate with AI. I looked at existed expressions and probes like:

• Rorschach test— Psychologists used the test to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.“By asking the person to tell you what they see in the inkblot, they are telling you about themselves, and how they project meaning onto the real world,” — psychologist Mike Drayton for BBC.

• Arrival, a sci-fi drama directed by Denis Villeneuve, is about language, communication, intention, and time. In the movie, humans create a whole alphabet system by studying how aliens communicate patterns.

• Human languages create associations for understanding context through composing compound characters.

(L) Sited from Teaching Culture through Language: Exploring Metaphor and Metonymy in Chinese Characters by Hu, Ying-Hsueh (R) German Compound words (R) in Chinese characters, elements of symbols combine to create a new character and new meaning

Experience Design

I storyboarded an experience for audiences to use metaphors, phrases, and poems to communicate the intangible emotions with AI.