Hello everyone, my name is Nico BRand, and I'm presenting on
behalf of my co authors William Odom and Sam Barnett. Today we
will present our pictorial titled Design Inquiry Into
Introspective AI: Surfacing Opportunities, Issues and
Paradoxes. In it, we propose seven speculative, introspective
AI services.
But first, what is introspective AI?
Let's start by defining introspection. It is the
practice of mentally looking inward and examining one's own
thoughts, emotions, values, desires and character.
It is a specific practice of critically accessing key past
experiences and patterns in one's life, either for self
development, reducing stress, or simply curiosity for insights
that are hard to capture in a busy everyday life.
While there are commercial services that are mediating
introspection, and even some that utilize rudimentary AI,
such as sorting journal entries, natural language processing, or
chatbots, there's a great potential to speculatively and
critically engage with this nascent design space. This leads
into our research questions.
How can the personal data records that a person
accumulates in their everyday life support self introspection,
practice and activities?
What roles might AI play in creating introspective resources
through surfacing known, potentially forgotten, or
unknown life experiences bound up in those archives? And what
potential benefits tangents and consequences exist in this
emerging design space? To investigate those questions we
engaged in the design research process. At first we
familiarized ourselves with the practice of introspection and
engage in activities methods literature, we wrote an analyze
stream journals credit vision boards that help to frame future
desires, created canvases that help to reflect on life and
surface emotions tied to our personal archives. We conducted
hands on explorations of AI systems, such as running journal
entries, true personality, insight extraction, and closing
the results on an interactive Canvas, or teaching a model on a
personal archive of artworks and reflected on the machine
outputs.
We produce early design concepts that critically and
speculatively engaged in what introspective AI services could
look like. They provided a foundation for future work.
Through this complex and intertwined process of ongoing
reflection and exploration, a set of five themes emerged that
shaped our inquiry into introspective AI.
These themes draw from introspective theory, and
inspired the design proposals presented in the pictorial.
Across our process, we wanted to move away from portraying AI as
a single all knowing agent that is always right that takes on a
human like form. In parallel to recent works in a design
research community, we do not view AI as possessing the same
form of reasoning that people have.
The uncertainty that comes with this difference can be seen as
an opportunity for design practice to generatively engage.
We frame introspective AI as a mediator and translator of vast,
rich and personal data records, a system that mediates between
users and their personal data to prompt and inspire moments of
contemplation and introspection.
we crafted seven design proposals and tailor them to
support specific introspective activities. Today, we will touch
on three proposals.
So let's dive in it.
A common future looking introspective practice, ask
people to visualize connections between their perceived actual
self and the envisioned ideal self. Division shrine device
visually manifest the user's goals dreams and desires as data
collage is an ideal self canvas that updates in real time as it
consumes their personal data.
The device prompts our user Ellison, what are you excited to
learn?
The answer is analyzed and a Max Ernst painting appears on the
canvas.
Each vision is causually connected as the Max Ernst image
grows her career at Google shrinks to make room for it.
Vision shrine changes the scale of goals depending on how
beliefs they are being prioritized in everyday life.
This is an ongoing dialogue between the users lift reality
and their envisioned ideal self.
To change the layout, users can scale and reposition those
visions, which will train the service and update the
aspirational score.
As Allison binge watches tennis videos on YouTube, Vishal Shrine
connects this data and introduces a passion for tennis
to collage. This decreases the privatization of your other
desires. This passive interaction provokes Allison to
contemplate tensions bound to her self-concept and question
the consequences of her competing visions.
So this proposal explores how we could use ludic framing to
capitalize intimate confrontations. It raises
questions around the ranking of personal desires in the context
of one's perceived ideal self and asks, could a system like
this lead to inauthentic visions of one's preferred future?
In our second proposal, mind probes investigates how a longer
term collaborative relationship between a person and their
introspective AI could be nurtured. How should we design
for ongoing dialogues was systems that make inferences
about us.
It's a smartphone app that works in tandem with external hardware
sensors, sound color smell haptic envision. it prompts the
user to collect sensory stimuli from the material world that
reflects social and emotional associations. Here Mind Probes
prompts Allison to capture sounds and feel melancholic.
Over time, these sounds accumulate into a soundscape
that represents her current understanding of melancholy.
Exploring her mind probe archive, she's able to reflect
on how her experience of melancholy has shifted across
time.
The other sensor create scapes that synthesize different
phenomena. The sounds that capture plus colors that
represent compassion, are objects that embody.
The introspective AI is constantly analyzing the
aggregate data and makes complex interferences.
The system in first and Allison's relationship to her
parents divorce has changed. To test this hypothesis mind probe
sets Ellison a new task.
This design proposal broke on how a personal AI model could be
trained intentionally with rich and subjective forms of personal
data, and the implication that this has for mediating
introspective experiences over time, we are interested in how
the subtle of unpredictable qualities of personal growth
would make it challenging for the AI to adapt.
How can this agency change the relationship between a user and
a model
and that's real trigger for introspection is socially
engaging in deep conversations with trusted companions.
Deep talk report is an application that audits verbal
and written conversations to find and classify deep
exchanges. Ellison is at the beach talking with Helen. She's
overwhelmed by the pressure of work and instability in her
life.
Deep job report analyzes this conversation in the background
and generates a curated unique experience. Friday afternoon as
part of an introspective ritual, Ellison opens this report,
she re experience her recent conversation with Helen. The
report highlights the quotes it believes are the most impactful
generative animations and audio snippets support this narrative.
At the end of each report, the service introduces three
introspective avenues to her. It proposes a tailored playlist
based on the topics and sentiments of the conversation.
it prompts to call her dad and ask how he was holding up in
situations like this when he was younger,
or to engage in a creative exercise to map the people that
influenced her most in life.
So several issues are bound up in this design proposals. Would
users willingly cede autonomy to their introspective AI trusting
you to extract and guide dialogue in the right way? Is
there even a right way?
Would the system create content in ways that are biased and with
this persistent growing and increasingly entangled archive
of deep exchange records, shape or change the initial ritual of
simply deep talking with loved ones?
Our work offers contributions that extend crowing calls in the
HCI community to enable people to gain alternative perspectives
on their life through personal data. Critically explore AI as a
design material, and inquire into potential technological
futures and impact their promise and peril. Our pictorial aims to
inspire frame and expand future research inquiries. What roles
could personal data play in helping us introspectively?
Consider who we are and desire to be? How might AI play
collaborative roles in this endeavor over time? And what
kind of new opportunities and consequences exists in the
introspective AI design space? And how should we reconcile
them?
We hope you enjoy the selection of design proposal presented and
learn more about the other foreign our pictorial on
introspective AI. We are open to any questions and discussions
and we thank you a lot for your time.