From cultures of experimentation, to culturally inclusive experiments
Katy Mogal & Alana Conner
2/3/2023
About the talk
Thanks to the power of AI, computing experiences aren’t just becoming smarter - they’re becoming more human-like. Academic and industry research shows that these anthropomorphic AIs elicit emotional connections and expectations from their human users. We humans lean into these connections; we put googly eyes on our Roombas, eyelashes on our car headlights, and even marry our robots.
Fostering appropriate and ethical emotional connections with AI requires companies to build cultures of careful experimentation. It’s not just as simple as running A/B tests, for three reasons: 1) Tech companies have paid less attention to users’ emotional needs than their cognitive and functional ones, and therefore have less expertise in meeting emotional needs; 2) Users’ emotions vary widely across regional, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, and other cultures, and experiments are needed to tune AI products to particular contexts, and 3) It’s easier to get emotions wrong than to get them right.
In this talk, we’ll describe and discuss these issues, talk about how experimentation needs to change in this brave new world of AI-powered experiences, and propose a series of experiments that can guide the development of emotionally appropriate, culturally inclusive AI.
Katy Mogal & Alana Conner
Katy
Katy è strategist e UX Lead nel team di Google Assistant: esplora il futuro delle interazioni e relazioni tra persone e computer. Ha più di 15 anni di esperienza nel creare conoscenza e nel dare forma a strategie aziendali, di design e di prodotto per aziende come Fitbit, Meta e Logitech. È spesso invitata come speaker alle conferenze e ha insegnato design e strategia al California College of the Arts e allo Stanford Continuing Studies. Vive a Roma e fa parte del comitato consultivo del Master in Product-Service-System Design del Politecnico di Milano
Alana
Alana Conner è una cultural scientist che scrive, parla e conduce ricerche su cultura, psicologia, salute e cambiamento sociale. Lavora come ricercatrice in Google, dove il suo team mira a rendere Google privato, sicuro e protetto. Ha pubblicato, tra le altre cose, Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World e collabora con clienti come la Banca Mondiale, per migliorare il benessere di comunità diverse in tutto il mondo.