by Alina Cherata<\/p>\n
\u201cSynthetic Sincerity\u201d –\u00a0 this intriguing title belongs to a mix of documentary and fiction directed by Marc Isaacs. The film recounts the details of a fictitious project carried out by the equally fictitious Synthetic Sincerity Lab at the University of Southern England, whose aim is to use AI in order to imitate human physiognomy as closely as possible. By analyzing and integrating a large corpus of data on how the human body responds to various stimuli, AI-generated avatars are humanized to an ever greater degree. Some of the data used for the project is interview footage from documentaries by British director Marc Isaacs, who in exchange for this sample material is allowed to observe the research activity at the lab and conduct interviews with the members of the research team.<\/p>\n
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Thus, while looking into the way AI replicates the expression of human emotion, Isaacs also ends up discovering human life stories like that of Lynn, the project manager, a Lebanese immigrant who lives in Britain but is emotionally deeply connected with her home country and the members of her family who still live in Beirut. Lynn\u2019s presence is often accompanied by wistful or intense Lebanese music, an indication of her inner dilemma: she has found a safe, financially comfortable life in Britain, but her deepest attachment is still to the world of her far-away country, with its people, culture and memories of home. Yet Lynn\u2019s story is not singular. Most members of the research team, including its leading expert, are immigrants – people who, one way or another, are in between worlds, whose humanity is complex and elusive.<\/p>\n
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This is also what the people in the interviews analyzed by AI have in common: they are all intricate, multi-dimensional beings, so that initial impressions are often contradicted by later information. For instance, there is a man who convincingly talks about his suffering and trauma, but is found to be lying. Conversely, the footage also shows a lady who confesses she is a thief, but then turns out to be profoundly affected by the loss of her three-year-old child; the unease in her facial expression and body language is not due, as it appears at first, to fear of punishment, but to a deeper uncertainty about the course and meaning of her life.<\/p>\n
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The task of the AI agents involved in the project seems to pose a number of challenges. They have to identify and integrate the most minute details of bodily movements and facial expressions that appear in humans, yet such physical elements are bound up not only with the corresponding emotions, but also with the motivation behind those emotions. However, people\u2019s behaviour is often neither consistent nor straightforward, and can be misleading. The same emotional manifestation may be triggered by different motivations. At the same time, feelings are not expressed in all situations, so there may be a gap between someone\u2019s inner landscape and its outer manifestation.<\/p>\n
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This is what happens in the case of the Uyghur chef who volunteers to act as a model for an AI avatar. He lives in Britain with his wife and children after having escaped from China. Decades have passed, yet he still misses his homeland and his mother. Nevertheless, he has learned to suppress emotions and avoid making explicit political statements in order to protect the members of his family that are still in China. AI replicates his face and voice, and takes the imitation a step further by making his virtual representation talk about the things he has chosen to be silent about: his fear of never seeing his mother again and the reasons that have driven him out of China. Not surprisingly, this attempt to \u201cgive a voice to the voiceless\u201d causes problems, as many collaborators of the Synthetic Sincerity project are Chinese.<\/p>\n
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What the avatar of the Uyghur chef does is an example of \u201csynthetic sincerity\u201d: the AI replica is more explicitly sincere than its human counterpart. On the other hand, leaving things unsaid is an important part of being human. Ironically, this is what AI notices at the beginning of the film, when it analyzes the documentary samples provided by Isaacs: some of the most valuable footage is that in which nothing is being said. Yet in the end the wish to \u201cimprove\u201d upon the original, to make him more conceptually consistent, prevails. Of course, this is a human wish, as it stems from the members of the research team.<\/p>\n
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Essentially, the challenge of imitating the physical expression of human emotion is interwoven with the question of what it means to be human. At this point, the theme of \u201cSynthetic Sincerity\u201d is evocative of the world depicted in \u201cBlade Runner\u201d, Ridley Scott\u2019s 1982 science fiction film based on a novel by Philip K. Dick. In \u201cBlade Runner\u201d, androids imitate humans so well that some of them end up believing they are human. They feel that the memories which have been implanted in their heads are their own, and develop human characterstics (vulnerability, sensitivity, love, loss, melancholy). Of course, these human attributes cause a lot of suffering when combined with the reduced life span of replicants. \u201cBlade Runner\u201d contains a poignant exploration of human nature and the challenges of imitating it. In contrast, the Synthetic Sincerity experiment remains at the incipient stage of outward imitation. At the same time, it also opens up a Pandora box of ethical concerns about the use of real people as models for human-like AI avatars, or the concept of \u201cgiving a voice to the voiceless\u201d by using someone\u2019s voice to say things that person has chosen not to talk about. Not least, it broaches the subject of authenticity and reality in the age of AI, which is probably why the film format itself plays with reality and fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Alina Cherata \u201cSynthetic Sincerity\u201d –\u00a0 this intriguing title belongs to a mix of documentary and fiction directed by Marc Isaacs. The film recounts the details of a fictitious project carried out by the equally fictitious Synthetic Sincerity Lab at the University of Southern England, whose aim is to use AI in order to imitate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1872,77],"tags":[1909,1873,1123,1910,1911],"class_list":["post-16380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-89-90","category-english","tag-alina-cherata","tag-egophobia-89-90","tag-english","tag-marc-isaacs","tag-synthetic-sincerity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-4gc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16381,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16380\/revisions\/16381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}