Editorial: Conversing with Machines
AI & Society · 2026
A friend was recounting how she was on the phone, calling to enquire about a product, and was at first asked some questions by what was ‘obviously’ a computerised voice, after which she was put through to an ‘operator’ with whom she happily spoke until the voice went into a recurring loop. The realisation that all this while she had been talking to a computer came as a surprise mingled with disappointment, as if she had been tricked. As dialogue systems, be they social robots, conversational agents (chatbots), etc., become applied in various spheres of daily life, the interest in making them appear and ‘be’ empathic is growing. Empathy is essential for us to be social beings; without it there would be no ‘care’, ‘love’, ‘nurture’, ‘ethics’, and ‘aesthetics’ in human life. The editorial on Empathy and AI: cognitive empathy or emotional (affective) empathy (Gill KS 2024, Gill SP 2024) asked whether AI in healthcare could support empathy, discussing the ‘simulated’ empathy that underlies social robots and chatbots, as being ‘cognitive’ empathy (Jeffrey 2015), and comparing this with ‘emotional’ empathy which is biologically associated with experiencing emotions that leads to empathic concern for others and thereby motivating us to offer help.
Read online →Entrainment and musicality in the human system interface
AI & Society · Vol. 21, pp. 567–605 · 25 May 2007
What constitutes our human capacity to engage and be in the same frame of mind as another human? How do we come to share a sense of what ‘looks good’ and what ‘makes sense’? How do we handle differences and come to coexist with them? How do we come to feel that we understand what someone else is experiencing? How are we able to walk in silence with someone familiar and be sharing a peaceful space? All of these aspects are part of human ‘interaction’. In designing interactive technologies designers have endeavoured to explicate, analyse and simulate, our capacity for social adaptation. Their motivations are mixed and include the desires to improve efficiency, improve consumption, to connect people, to make it easier for people to work together, to improve education and learning. In these endeavours to explicate, analyse and simulate, there is a fundamental human capacity that is beyond technology and that facilitates these aspects of being, feeling and thinking with others. That capacity, we suggest, is human entrainment. This is our ability to coordinate the timing of our behaviours and rhythmically synchronise our attentional resources. Expressed within the movements of our bodies and voices, it has a quality that is akin to music. In this paper, disparate domains of research such as pragmatics, social psychology, behaviourism, cognitive science, computational linguistics, gesture, are brought together, and considered in light of the developments in interactive technology, in order to shape a conceptual framework for understanding entrainment in everyday human interaction.
Read online →Rhythmic synchrony and mediated interaction: towards a framework of rhythm in embodied interaction
Gill SP · AI & Society · Vol. 27, pp. 111–127 · 2012
Our everyday interactions increasingly involve both embodied face-to-face communication and various forms of mediated and distributed communication such as email, skype, and facebook. In daily face-to-face communications, we are connected in rhythm and synchrony at multiple levels ranging from the moment-by-moment continuity of timed syllables to emergent body and vocal rhythms of pragmatic sense-making. Our human capacity to synchronize with each other may be essential for our survival as social beings. Moving our bodies and voices together in time embodies a potent pragmatic purpose that of being together. In this synchrony of self with other, witnessing and being present become part of each other. There is growing research into how rhythm and synchrony operate in embodied face-to-face interaction and this provides parameters for investigating the relations and differences in how we connect and are socially present in the embodied and distributed settings, and understanding the effect of one setting upon the other. This paper explores the arena of research into rhythm in human interaction, musical and linguistic, with a focus on the movements of body and voice. It draws together salient issues and ideas that would form the basis for a framework of rhythm in embodied interaction.
Read online →Presence as Performance: Exploring Witnessed Presence
Nevejan C, Gill SP · AI & Society · Vol. 27, pp. 1–4 · 2012
The performing arts have been concerned with mediating presence through orchestration, dramatization and choreography for many centuries. Insights, knowledge and skills have been passed over through direct transmission, from person to person, from generation to generation. Current technology mediated presence design faces similar challenges to that of the performing arts: how to set a context, how to induce attribution and imagination, how to show the unsaid and more. Some issues have changed radically though with the introduction of digital technology: we can have sensual synchronous experiences while we are not in the same place, we can connect and possibly act in places where we are not present, all mediated presences can be copied endlessly and will last forever. These old and new questions are not only relevant for the performing arts, but for many professional realms that have to deal with on-and offline collaboration as well. Most contributors to this collection work in the arts and/or use artistic practice as inspiration for their academic and scientific work.
Read online →Aesthetic design: Dialogue and learning. A case study of landscape architecture
Gill SP · AI & Society · Vol. 9, pp. 273–285 · 1995
In this paper the concept of knowledge is seen as embodying dialogue and learning in a shared practice. Sharing a practice involves sharing representations of practice. This necessitates the sharing of experiential knowledge at various levels and in various forms. It is proposed that participatory design can therefore be seen as consisting in dialogue and learning for the development of future practices and representations. The discussion in this paper is situated within the domain of landscape architecture. A study is made of their cooperative practices, which are evolved, in order to show the need for participatory embodied activity (whether expressed verbally or physically) in sharing practical knowledge (e.g. of aesthetic judgement).
Read online →Knowledge in co-action: social intelligence in collaborative design activity
Gill SP, Borchers J · AI & Society · Vol. 18, p. 86 · 2004
Skilled cooperative action means being able to understand the communicative situation and know how and when to respond appropriately for the purpose at hand. This skill is of the performance of knowledge in co-action and is a form of social intelligence for sustainable interaction. Social intelligence, here, denotes the ability of actors and agents to manage their relationships with each other. Within an environment we have people, tools, artefacts and technologies that we engage with. Let us consider all of these as dynamic representations of knowledge. When this knowledge becomes enacted, i.e., when we understand how to use it to communicate effectively, such that it becomes invisible to us, it becomes knowledge in co-action. A challenge of social intelligence design is to create mediating interfaces that can become invisible to us, i.e., as an extension of ourselves. In this paper, we present a study of the way people use surfaces that afford graphical interaction, in collaborative design tasks, in order to inform the design of intelligent user interfaces. This is a descriptive study rather than a usability study, to explore how size, orientation and horizontal and vertical positioning, influences the functionality of the surface in a collaborative setting.
Read online →On two AI traditions
Gill SP · AI & Society · Vol. 2, pp. 321–340 · 1988
To understand the role of expert systems as a medium for transferring knowledge and skills within organisations requires an understanding of the nature of expertise within working life contexts. Central to this issue of transfer is the debate on the nature of tacit/implicit knowledge and the problem of formalising it in explicit form. This paper considers the British approach to the development of knowledge-based systems, which is regarded as being predominantly rationalistic, and compares it with the Scandinavian approach, which is regarded as being predominantly humanistic. The paper proposes that crucial to the debate on the transfer of knowledge and skills is the development of expert systems as communications media which aims at enhancing and sharing the knowledge and skills of users. A human-centred approach for the future is proposed which brings the above two traditions together thereby providing a developmental framework for knowledge based systems.
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