Who Am i Talking To?: Critical Reflections on Socially Interactive Agents in Current Media Art

Abstract

With their aesthetic, multi-sensory, and often radical approaches, artists are predestined to provide impulses for critical reflection and the necessary social discourse of Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs). For this paper, five outstanding works from female media artists were selected, most of them discussing these technological entities within a Feminist Artificial Intelligence (FAI) framework that addresses biases and inequities triggered, adopted or reinforced by AI. Drawing on the method of qualitative comparison that is well-established in most humanities disciplines, the authors approach these artworks from the complementary perspectives of art studies and computer science. Building upon descriptions of the artworks, similarities and differences will be outlined and interpreted to reveal what new perspectives these artists bring into the social discourse of SIAs. The comparison is structured along three topics: the digital implementation of the artworks, the confrontation of user expectations towards AI, and the reflection of human-machine relation. This analysis will lead to a discussion of the findings in the context of current research and of potential blind spots in science and society as identified by the artists. The paper will conclude with a contextualization of the artists' practices within the FAI framework, a differentiation from the Responsible Artificial Intelligence approach, and learnings for future SIA development.