Automating Empathy

– A Short Film –

To move the needle for Responsible AI and a healthy human-machine future for all, it can’t just be about texts, presentations and papers. Creative engagement is essential, and part of our commitment for AEGIS. We present a short, animated film about humanity’s relationship with empathic AI companions.

Please share and use this short film – potentially for teaching, literacy initiatives, improving presentations, or wherever a short cut to understanding intimate relationships with AI is helpful.

Automating Empathy

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    Video explores the possibilities, illusions and hazards of human-machine intimacy, and the urgent need for policy, standards, and guidance.

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    6 mins of lovingly hand-crafted filmmaking, blending paper art, stop motion, time lapse and live action by Conor Flanagan & Maria Figueiredo, with original foley & music by Steve & Dave Elton.

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    Original script reflects years of academic & industry collaboration by the AEGIS team & partners. Written and narrated by AEGIS team member Ben Bland.

About the Film

Automating Empathy is a poetic primer on the emergence of empathy between us humans and our new AI companions.

We suddenly find ourselves living among machines that have infinite patience, access to most of the world's knowledge, and superhuman powers of analysis. Our slowly evolved brains and bodies are not ready for this. It’s not a balanced relationship.

In our interactions with AI companions, we now sit face-to-face with social actors that look, sound, act and emote in ways that trick our minds into animating them with life and spirit. Emerging from the sheer complexity of these digital models, and the richness of their dialogue with us, is a strange new form of empathy. Intelligent machines appear to understand us, how we feel, what we’re thinking, and share our perspective, but they do so in ways that are distinctly not human. Nevertheless, the effect is powerful. Consciously or not, we become participants in a kind of deception that could deliver great benefits (entertainment, social support, creativity) or harm (exploitation, desensitisation, isolation).

Automating Empathy explores the arrival of these new relationships and the potential pathways they could take us on. Aligning with the AEGIS project, the story promotes the continued development of laws, standards, guidance, and participation from everyone involved in the deployment of these systems, to ensure that these machines are built to serve people and planet.

If we are to allow our digital companions to grow ever better at performing something that feels a lot like empathy, they must be created with our best interests at heart.

This short film narrates several of the key themes our team explored for AEGIS, as well as in our other related engagements.

Animation/Design: Conor Flanagan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorflanagan/), Maria Figueiredo (https://www.instagram.com/papering.penguin)

Script/Narration: Ben Bland (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benbland/)

Original music and sound design: Steve Elton (https://soundcloud.com/step5), Dave Elton (https://ursadsp.com/)

Made by Human Hands

Despite working closely with AI, for Automating Empathy we wanted to show the “artist’s hand” to emphasise that intelligent machines are a human creation, inheriting as much of our flaws as our beauty. The film is therefore extremely handmade, from the script to the paper-based stop-motion, and the original foley and live piano.

Animating the Machine

Automating Empathy is build from a blend of visual styles, created by Belfast-based duo, Conor Flanagan and Maria Figueiredo. Both accomplished animators and VFx artists for major TV productions, they chose to mix physical and virtual environments, to bring the viewer in and out of the “mindset” of powerful new forms of AI, not just of the people who interact with them.