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Join us for our online seminar series event hosted by MIT Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program. This event features Auren Liu, research assistant in the Fluid Interfaces group and part of the AHA team whose work explores the interplay between conversational AI, loneliness, and socialization.
Talks are all recorded and made available afterwards on YouTube, linked on each event webpage.
Loneliness is a growing and global issue that affects approximately a third of individuals in industrialized countries. Given the rapid increase in popularity of conversational AI services such as Replika and Character.ai, it has become pertinent to investigate how their usage may influence an individual’s mental state, sense of loneliness and human relationships in both positive and negative ways.
The question of how the usage of conversational AI influences loneliness has no clean answer beyond, "it depends." However, what it depends on is critical to know, and Auren's work explores how contextual factors such as psychological, social, and and usage patterns impact outcomes on loneliness.
In this talk, Auren will discuss their work investigating how individuals who use conversational AI are influenced through their interactions with these AI systems. Surveys of real-world users provide insights into how patterns of usage and various social, emotional, and other factors may be connected to loneliness. Controlled user studies have explored potential mechanisms for both improving and worsening loneliness, such as user perceptions, and daily usage.
Auren Liu is a research assistant in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab and founding member of the Advancing Humans with AI program, working towards a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program. Previously, they have completed a B.S. degree in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, with minors in computer science, robotics, and computer-integrated surgery. They have a broad interest in exploring the intersection of humanity and technology to bring the best of both together in an integrated future—how both can benefit from and improve each other.
Their research explores how the use of conversational AI as companions affects mental health. Particularly, they investigate how AI can be used to address the ever-growing epidemic of loneliness, approaching loneliness through the lens of public health. Their work has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence, presented at the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), and featured in several news articles.