I decided to go with option 2 as I was always fascinated with the idea that people could form “relationships” with AI’s, virtual assistants and virtual friends. I wondered if for some people perhaps their last resort at a real connection in a world full of isolation especially following the Covid-19 Pandemic. I myself have delt with the personal experience of isolation when I first started dealing with OCD and anxiety. I remember only a month after I first started showing symptoms I felt lost and like I had no one to talk too. It was only once I got in contact with a professional that I no longer felt so alone. My aim with this piece was to take the same situation except to have the person suffering have their last resort be a AI or virtual assistant. I wanted to explore if an AI or virtual assistant could or would be able to help and explore the desperation of having a listener who often fails to understand what makes humans, human.
In order to make my piece I first wrote down a list of questions and asked them to a variety of virtual assistants and AI psychologist. These included Siri, Replika, Google Assistant and Eliza the computer therapist. I then wrote down their various responses with all of them being equally similar to each other. Once I had the responses I typed them into a text to speech platform which was able to recreate the various platform’s voices. I first tried screen recording the AI’s when they spoke but this had its challenges as recordings had to be timed perfectly so responses were not cut off.
Whilst completing this task I learnt that AI are still highly inferior to any human interaction. Most if not all AI lack the human traits which make these relationships so helpful in maintaining a healthy mind. AI’s lack many human traits such as the obvious emotions and a true moral compass. However, the more noticeable ones were things like body language which is often used in during conversation for people to connect such as sitting closer, offering a hand or arm to hold onto or smiling. These directly connect to primal instincts in our brain which unfortunately are yet to replicated by any virtual assistant.
When listening to their responses I also noticed that AI’s often lack cadence or variation in their voice which also leaves the interaction feeling very empty. Sentences and speech is often monotone, slow and bland. I found it very hard to believe that any human listening to such speech could form a real human connection with it. On the other hand AI’s cannot detect the desperation or emotion in a humans voice and merely only understand the words which they are speaking. Another trait which makes human to human interaction so valuable as someone can simply understand another’s feelings or mental state by the way the speak i.e pauses, shaking, stuttering.
I would love to explore these relationships more in the future as there are a lot of stories online of people forming platonic and romantic connections with AI’s. I would like to explore how these individuals feel their relationship benefits them and if they feel like the relationship with their AI counterpart is lacking anything. I would also love to research if there are any advancements or future advancements in virtual assistants in terms of their ability to listen and detect tonal differences in the users voice. Perhaps in the future AI’s will be able to detect things such as desperation of sadness in a person’s tone of voice.
Following the creation of my piece and the various “conversations” I had with AI’s I feel that at this current moment it would be impossible to form a real relationship with an AI if someone was desperate and had no other choice. To me their inability to listen correctly some of the time and their bland almost empty responses made me feel like as a user I was speaking to a brick wall. It felt the same as calling a customer service representative for a big brand and felt like you issues were falling on deaf ears. I do believe that not too far in the future with the rapid rate at which AI or developing that they will be able to offer more personable connections with the user. However, there will be some things which will never be able to be replicated by AI which form the basis of human to human interaction as mentioned above such as body language and empathy.
REFERENCES
MUSIC:
Aniqp (2022), Untitled27 [song], Youtube website, accessed 13th of March 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BYlqlgYwPY
TEXT TO SPEECH TOOLS:
Page Role Media (2023) Voicemaker, Voicemaker – Text to speech website, accessed 12th of March 2023, https://voicemaker.in/