Can A.I. Truly Replicate the Human Experience?
The principal component of visual, textual, or auditory communication is understanding and sharing emotions with your audience. Feeling understood is a human need. To truly comprehend the people you’re trying to communicate with, you must put yourself in their shoes and think about what they were feeling before or what they might feel after consuming a particular piece of media.
To achieve this, a creator must have a strong sense of empathy. This skill allows you to dive deeper into human emotion and develop a strong recognition of your audience’s behaviors and feelings.
Mirriam-Webster defines empathy as the act of “understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” It is actively sharing an experience involving emotion with another human being.
So, What Does Having Empathy Accomplish
The world is made up of 8 billion people. Each holds different beliefs and values from diverse socio-economic, political, and cultural backgrounds. Empathy allows us to reach out to them and form mutual understandings based on shared experiences despite our differences.
It resonates with people. People feel seen when someone else can recognize their point of view and understand why they do what they do. Forming these connections, in turn, creates a strong foundation for building trust.
Trust is a vital aspect of maintaining human relationships. If someone doesn’t think they can trust you, why would they want to interact with you in the first place? It is an equally important factor when we start to think about it in terms of conducting business. Without trust or empathy, people have no reason to want to come back to you for a good or service.
Is Empathy Learned Behavior?
In short, yes. While there are some aspects of empathy that one could argue are instinctively human, for the most part, people are taught to be empathetic. Whether directly or indirectly, from infancy, human beings observe and absorb specific social cues, mostly from our parents, that develop into empathetic behaviors as we get older. It is a skill we refine through everyday interactions with people and the world around us over the years. But can Artificial Intelligence learn these same behaviors?
For years, various companies have been developing different versions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cope with today's ever-changing technological advancements. Whether you’re looking at art and design, writing, or even medicine, it seems like a new AI gets dropped every week with the ability to mimic a person’s job in these industries.
A new type of artificial intelligence, Empathetic or Emotional AI, has been making waves due to its ability to respond to human interaction and emotion. It uses its algorithm to develop artificial empathy, tracking human behavior through a series of specific data collection. Some of these include facial expressions, tonal expressions, dilation of the pupils, and vocal cadence.
This type of AI data collection can benefit people who work in communications, particularly marketers, as stated in this World Economic Forum article by Dhara Bhansali. It makes the case that the information gathered from these AI systems can be used more efficiently to track and predict human behaviors related to marketing campaigns. Therefore, it streamlines the research process regarding getting to know targeted audiences.
Are Humans Obsolete?
If AI can accomplish the same things a person can, including empathy, a trait previously thought to be exclusively related to the human experience, then is there a point in keeping people around?
Of course, there is! As intelligent and adaptable as AI software can be, there is one thing it would never genuinely have. That is human insight. Without humanity’s touch, everything that makes an AI work would cease to be.
If you look at art AIs like Midjourney or Deep Dream Generator, you’ll find that these “innovative” image-generating software don’t come up with the designs all on their own. They pull from large databases of already existing art, often gathered without the original artist’s consent, and generate an amalgamation of art styles and concepts belonging to other people. Without creative individuals having already made the art, these AIs would not function as they currently do. It is a complicated subject, to be sure, but if this were an actual person doing this, the ethics (or lack thereof) would be pretty straightforward.
An empathetic AI might be able to gather data on a person crying, recording their reaction. But unless it’s explicitly told, it would be unable to distinguish why that person is crying. There are specific nuances to behavior that remain exclusive to humans. Cultural and social context is a significant factor in this and a part of the empathetic learning process of human beings I mentioned before.
There are other flaws in AI to consider as well. Because Artificial Intelligence is a human creation, it’s bound to make mistakes. Algorithmic bias is something companies employing AI need to consider. This type of bias is not a new concept regarding certain recognition software types. I am reminded of the viral video of a bathroom soap dispenser not recognizing darker skin tones. The AI’s developer and employer are responsible for ensuring these biases don’t do irreparable damage.
Where We Go From Here
Artificial Intelligence cannot perfectly replicate human emotions, and I doubt it ever will. Human beings experience hundreds, if not thousands, of unique emotions for many reasons. Something that constantly changes as we evolve, and so does the world around us.
We, as a society, need people. People who are creative, caring, and empathetic to the human experience.
If there’s one thing you take from this, let it be that AI is not a monster to be feared. It is a tool that could help human beings improve the way they communicate with one another.
