Cogent Arts & Humanities

Affective AI: Emotions, Identity and Algorithms

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Affective AI: Emotions, Identity and Algorithms".

From falling in love with a ChatGPT, to interactive and emotionally responsive pet robots to combat loneliness – we are at a crucial moment in time when more widely accessible AI tools are mediating, predicting, shaping, and even replacing our sense of affective identities, bodies and daily practices. As Youn and Jin (2021) state, “the shift from ‘the thinking economy’ to ‘the feeling economy’ speaks to the importance of developing both emotion-focused human intelligence (HI) and artificial intelligence (AI) with empathetic skills”. Indeed, what does this desire to move towards affective technologies tell us about the ways we think, feel, experience, react to and express our emotions? Should we embrace and/or resist the current rush towards an AI-powered, algorithmic-driven society and “feeling economy”? What does AI “do” to our emotions, and vice versa, what do our emotions “do” to the operationalisation of AI?

Answering and exploring such questions become paramount to understanding potential pathways to positive change, and equally, the potential pitfalls leading to negative consequences. Current popular and academic discourse celebrates the revolutionary ways in which affective AI-powered tools can assist and improve lives within a range of contexts (e.g. health and social care, creativity, education); and, by the same token, they warn us of the ethical, emotional and behavioural costs associated with affective AI technologies (e.g. issues around privacy and surveillance, emotional manipulation, biased inequalities). This collection explores this tension, examining the myriad of ways in which AI tools intersect with the algorithmically-driven, affective field of emotion.

We welcome theoretical and/or empirical contributions – especially interdisciplinary enquiries – that critically explore A.I. tools and related affective practices in relation to any of the following themes (and beyond, if relevant):

• Dating, relationships and intimacy
• Affective economies
• Apps and social media
• Affective/intimate publics
• Robots and machines (e.g. androids, robot pets)
• Health and (emotional) wellbeing
• Bodies and perception
• Identity (gender, race, class, sexuality, age, ableism etc.)
• Surveillance and regulation
• Emotion recognition and predictive technologies
• Algorithmic / platform culture
• Death
• Memory and nostalgia
• Digital justice and data governance

Meet the Guest Advisor

Dr. Esperanza Miyake is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Media and Communication at the Department of Humanities, University of Strathclyde. Miyake is also the Chair of the Humanities Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee. Miyake has a wide range of published books, articles and policy-led reports, mainly in the area of Digital and Media Studies.

The Guest Advisors declare no conflict of interest regarding this work.