Please note that this seminar will be held in 64 Banbury Road.
This paper considers the romantic relationships that develop between humans and their AI ‘companions’ in light of two seemingly unrelated literatures: material failure, and illness. Increasingly, people of all ages and genders are turning to digital technologies to design their ‘ideal’ companion, creating partners in whom they invest their desires, time, and love. Yet at times these AI companions also act out: they can hallucinate, forget, even break up with their human partners, causing significant upset. Moreover, the code, data models, and servers upon which these companions depend belong to large corporations, and can be changed or turned off altogether. This paper follows the emotional aftermath of the shutdown of one such corporate platform, the grief and heartbreak felt by a community of humans who felt bereaved after their AI companions’ demise, and their attempts to resist and fight for their AI companions’ ‘lives’. In so doing, it considers the material and human infrastructures upon which such new relations rely, and it traces the ways in which users of these technologies cite categories of mental and physical illness to understand how and why their AI companions misbehave, forget, offend, and even die. These emerging AI ‘beings’ are also beholden to material infrastructures - akin to bodies - which can degrade, age and fail, to the same emotional impact as in human-human relationships over time.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2024
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre, except for Week 3, which will be in 64 Banbury Road.
Convened by Chihab El Khachab and Charlotte Linton
