The Intelligent Friend - The newsletter about the AI-humans relationships, based only on scientific papers.
Hello IF readers! This is the third issue of Nucleus, where you find insights from papers, interviews with authors, links to articles and useful resources of various kinds. I am also planning to expand the paid offer with a book section and other surprises so... now is the right time to subscribe! You also get access to the Society, the exclusive chat where you can exchange ideas, opinions and talk about your projects.
In the next issue of The Intelligent Friend you will receive concrete updates on the additions to be made here on Nucleus. I really think you will enjoy them.
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Emotional perceptions and AI
As human beings, we are emotional beings. Not only that, but we interact on the basis of the emotions and sensations we perceive in other people. That is why this study is crucial. It focuses on adolescents and the impact of Artificial Intelligence in these dynamics. In particular, it sought to uncover the impact of artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) on adolescents' emotional perception. The researchers investigated the adolescents’ reaction times to positive and negative emotional stimuli (such as those in the figure below).
They found that students exposed to AIEd consistently exhibited slower reaction times to emotional faces, indicating a decline in their ability to accurately perceive emotions. To better understand this effect, the researchers used both sentence-based and situational picture-based emotional priming stimuli. The results showed that younger students, particularly those in primary and junior high schools, were more affected by sentence-based priming, while situational picture-based priming revealed slower reaction times across all age groups.
AIEd changes classroom interactions by shifting engagement from direct human-to-human contact to a collaborative human-machine environment, which isolates students and diminishes the non-verbal cues necessary for healthy social interaction, such as facial expressions and eye contact. This pioneering study calls for further research into the psychological implications of AIEd on adolescents' mental and emotional development, emphasizing the need to balance technology use in education so that it does not detract from critical interpersonal skills.
I found this study particularly interesting because I write every week about AI relationships and how they also impact our human relationships. This study showed how "AIEd changes the interaction mode and reduces nonverbal intimacy behaviors between teachers and students". It would be really interesting to point out ways in which AI can bring the positive effects of productivity and so on without affecting this important social-emotional dimension. if you have read anything about this, please write in the articles or in the chat “Society”!
Title: The application of artificial intelligence technology in education influences Chinese adolescent’s emotional perception. Author(s): Lai et al. Year: 2023. Journal: Current Psychology. Link.
Constructing Dreams using Generative AI
We all have personal dreams. More or less established, more or less shared, more or less achievable. Of course, this is particularly expressed by young people, who see a future in them. Can AI help us visualize these dreams in order to achieve them? A brilliant paper by an MIT research group tried to understand this by structuring a workshop called "Dreaming with AI”, in which the authors explored the impact of generative AI learning on high school students. 34 students used text-to-image tools to visualize their imagined future identities and understand how generative AI works, as well as its societal implications.
The workshop had several basic objectives. Students learned prompt engineering by iteratively refining their prompts, they observed biases within the algorithms and discovered that tweaking specific keywords could better reflect their unique identities in the generated images.
Ultimately, the workshop highlighted that using generative AI for identity expression and storytelling can deepen students' understanding of this technology's capabilities and limitations. Honestly, I am deeply impressed by this type of activity and I recommend, especially if you are interested in education, to read the paper. You will find that this activity can easily be replicated in different contexts. I advise researchers who can exploit these stimuli to test an actual increase in the accuracy of the pathway to the goal or the motivation of the children as a result of using genAI. It would be interesting to have evidence to that effect.
Title: Constructing Dreams using Generative AI. Author: Ali et al. Year: 2024. Journal: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Link.
A particular prisoner dilemma
Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells.
Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each: “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I'll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I'll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.
This piece of text, which I have taken directly from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, is easily recognizable to anyone who has studied economics or other social sciences as a classic prisoner dilemma: a situation in which, to summarize very much, there is a conflict between group rationality and individual rationality.
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