Artificial Intelligence + Human Connection with Anne Hsu

Founder of Diplomacy Dojo

Back in August last year, around the time I began to really dial down production of the newsletter and podcast, an email popped up in my inbox.

It came from Anne Hsu, a new listener who wanted to connect after hearing me speak on the Art2Life podcast (one of my best interviews on another show to date, I think).

Despite her background in computing, Anne told me of our shared love between the arts and sciences. That her Ph.D. was in Physics (my personal favorite!) and that her true passions are art and psychology. Especially, as she put it, when viewed “from an emotional aesthetic perspective.”

Like a lot of us who find ourselves interested in the sciences—even for people who primarily see the world and conceive of reality through this lens—it can be quite constricting. Anne is no exception. My favorite part of her email to me said:

“It's funny when I hear you talk about how you’re inspired by the poetry in physics. I remember I felt the same in my graduate school days when I was in the physics department (though my thesis topic was in neuroscience). It was so thrilling to be deriving equations of the universe, but then the daily slog of wrestling only with numbers and computational models for me did put a significant damper on my sense of awe and more romantic feelings!”

She didn’t know this at the time, but we also share a past history in the study of behavior change—something I’ve considered a lot in my years of branding and marketing work.

So, needless to say, there were a lot of seeming connections between Anne and me, and I was thrilled she’d reached out. Wanting to know more, I asked if I could include her in an upcoming write-up.

Here’s what she had to say.

Brandi: I can genuinely say that I don’t think of emotional health when it comes to artificial intelligence, and it doesn’t seem like I’m alone in that. I think most people see AI or anything machine-related as a kind of “cold” technology. Meaning, it doesn’t exactly inspire warmth or human connection. So, how are you connecting these seemingly un-connected things?
Anne: I've been working on artificial intelligence that aims to help improve human relationships and emotional health. This includes supporting a healthy emotional connection with ourselves as well as connections with others. So you’re not wrong—AI is often seen as something that might create a greater disconnection between people, which is indeed a potential risk in our increasingly technology-mediated world. However, as with all technologies, their impact depends largely on what they’re built for and how we apply them.

I've been using AI to help people find the emotionally connecting approach to difficult situations such as interpersonal differences or critical feedback. The AI is developed using neuroscience-based principles for effective communication in emotionally challenging situations. It helps you find the aspirational, constructive approach and discuss the situation without judgment or blame. It does this by analyzing the language that someone uses and detecting when phrases may sound judgmental or disconnecting and helps people communicate in difficult situations.

AI doesn't have emotions, which has the advantage that it will not be consumed by negative emotions. Thus, it can serve as a neutral emotional support tool. Also, there are times when people prefer not to talk to another human being and instead prefer to get feedback from an AI because the AI will not blame or judge them like a human might.

B: How did you come to find the intersections between these things or the idea of mashing them together?
A: I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Psychology at Queen Mary, University of London and this is a project that comes from my research. I've always been primarily interested in psychology and how to help people with motivation, behavior change, and well-being. My educational background has been in the computational sciences (my Ph.D. was in physics and computational neuroscience) and this intersection comes as the result of my computational background applied to the topic that I'm most interested in: how to help people overcome emotional challenges, find the inner freedom to be able to make choices, and act in line with their values.

B: What's your favorite or a fun interesting fact you love about AI and human connection, or related to your work in some way?
A: We are very much wired to connect and relate, and even very simple automated experiences can evoke feelings of attachment and connection from us. Long before we had sophisticated AI models, there were many studies showing how readily we relate to anthropomorphized objects, including machines. We apply the same social rules that we use for humans to computers.

For example, research finds that if a computer has been helpful in answering people’s questions, and then they’re asked to do a tedious task that they are told will improve the computer’s function, they are more likely to do the task.

Another study used a simple question-and-answer activity to look at how a computer can gain our trust and get us to reveal our private secrets in the same way as human confidants. Here, researchers compared a condition where they revealed information about the computer before asking people to share their private information. They started with lighter topics, such as "When this computer doesn’t have any work to do, it runs its screensaver. What do you like to do in your free time?" Then the computer moved onto more sensitive topics, like "Sometimes this computer crashes randomly, causing great inconvenience to the user. What have you done that you are most guilty about?" or "Sometimes the computer is very popular and used a lot. But other times days go by with no one using it and it sits there with nothing to do. What are some of the things that really hurt your feelings?" These studies found that people were more likely to share juicy, intimate information about themselves if the computer shared information about itself first. People who were asked to switch computers (after engaging in the same activity of sharing private information with a first computer) were less likely to share intimate information because this was a new computer they had not formed attachments with.

B: What do you think drives your work, what do you want people to know, or what do you find so important about doing this work?
A: More than anything, I'm driven to help deepen people's relationships to themselves and others. I'm really inspired by the great humanist psychologists, which include Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Marshall Rosenberg, whose work in Non-Violent Communication was the starting point for this work. I think with the outcome-oriented cultures that many of us live in, there often is not enough space for people to connect with what's going on inside of themselves. I've always been primarily fascinated by our inner worlds, how we think and feel, and why we are motivated to do the things we do. I find it really sad that it is possible for someone to live an entire life with relatively little insight into themselves and what they really care about. I hope that this work can offer people a guide for how to examine and discuss what's important for them on the inside.

B: Do you make money doing this?
A: Yes, Diplomacy Dojo is a commercial business we offer AI along with training courses and licensing of trainers for delivering training courses.

B: What would you like readers to check out?
A: We’re launching our new training licensing program, Emotional Health Essentials. This enables employees and managers to become licensed in-house trainers to deliver our neuroscience-based training program on emotional health. You can also find me at Self-Mastery Science, where I offer creative coaching to a limited number of individuals and offer courses to help people transform their inner critic or have empowering conversations.

B: Lastly, who's one other person, project, or idea that's connecting "seemingly un-connectable" things?
A: William Kentridge is one of my favourite artists and I find him a great creative inspiration. He combines theatre, puppetry, drawing, animation, poetry, and film in incredibly innovative and expressive ways. Even though the themes of his artwork (apartheid and colonialism) are very far from my personal experience, something about the world he creates with its vitality, movement, and poignancy makes me feel understood and helps my inner world feel seen.

Related Reading & Listening

1. “Algorithmic Apparitions,” a piece over at Pioneer Works, on “how Aarati Akkapeddi leverages machine bias as a practice of self-reflection.”

2. I actually mentioned this to Anne after drafting this piece, but her work reminds me a lot of my conversation with Lincoln Carr, another professor who’s also a physicist and a poet. In the class of Lincoln’s that I audited, which we discuss at length in the interview, he taught us about the work of Alex Gorodinski, a researcher who’s extensively studied different “types of thought.” Find a link to Alex and his types of thought in the Show Notes toward the bottom of that URL if you’re interested.

3. Have you ever seen The Most Unknown? In it, nine scientists each visit one of the other scientists in the group. Each scientist works in a different scientific discipline. And, both shockingly and unsurprisingly, it seems they each marvel that there are connections between their disciplines when meeting the others. I loved it, of course, back when I watched it on Netflix. This random YouTube channel was the only place I could find it for you to watch now, though.

4. And, Ashley Jane Lewis, another former podcast guest, once created a performance series called “Opening the Portal,” where a machine learning model was trained on a corpus of classic sci-fi and then given additional prompts from current-day BIPOC creatives in order to output new “prophecies” of what the future would look like if imagined by BIPOC folks. She spoke with me about it a bit in our interview.