Where is Vincent? Expanding our emotional selves with AI

Abstract

In what ways could the future of emotional bonds between humans and conversational AI change us? To explore this question in a multi-faceted manner, designers, engineers, philosophers as separate focus groups were given a design fiction probe— a story of a chatbot’s disappearance from a person’s life. Though articulated in discipline-specific ways, participants expressed similar concerns and hopes: 1) caring for a machine could teach people to emotionally care for themselves and others, 2) the boundary between human and non-human emotions may become blurred when people project their own emotions onto AI, e.g., a bot’s ”breakdown” as one’s own, and 3) people may then intertwine their identities with AI through emotions. We consider ethical ramifications of socially constructed emotions between humans and conversational agents.