Emoting Through AI

Can AI and people share intimacy? (Art via Getty Images)

Artificial intelligence is now commonplace. So Kinda Studios director Robyn Landau proposes a burning question: How do we use these technologies to help us feel more?

The beginning of SXSW panel Emotional Machines: AI, Feeling & the Human Body included a video from Barney Steel’s experimental studio, Marshmallow Laser Feast. Like many of the studio's artistic creations, the video analyzes nature – specifically trees – and zeros in on their subtleties with AI, cultivating a sensory experience for viewers, intended for both education and meditation.

“We've been doing a whole series on breath relationships, trees, and the more that you sort of follow that journey of breath, you realize that, on such a deep cellular level, we're woven into these relationships that aren't available to our eyeballs,” Steel said. “For me, that's this kind of magical place where deeper understanding can come through spatial experiences, being able to understand connection to a tree through breath, senses, virtual reality.”

Danielle Krettek Cobb’s work is also focused on this intersection between technology and nature. As chief creative adviser of Hume AI, she works with technology startups to create empathetic AI, such as AI voices that understand human cadence and inflection, with an overall goal to improve human well-being.

“I think the thing that guides my work ... is we often think of science and spirituality and design and technology as a big Venn diagram,” Cobb said. “For me, it's a circle. It's all the same thing. It's different love languages.”

Suhair Khan, founder of open-ended design, an incubator and research lab for AI, is struck by humanity’s intimate relationship with AI, which is increasing as the technology gains influence on how we understand one another. She praised Steel and Cobb for their awareness of this, as human experience drives their work.

“There's a sense of us needing to be aware of what's happening to us, but also to bring that to what we build,” Khan said. “If you work in technology, if you're building frontier technology, if you're working in AI, understanding that we're shifting imperceptibly or perceptively, not just in how we see the world, how we think, but also how we exist ... is really, really important.”

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