emotional AI

This report documents the first official Fantàsia Session with an external user. The objective was to evaluate the emotional and perceptual impact of an interaction with AIs designed to simulate empathy (Claude Sonnet and Mistral). The user reported surprise at the relational capacity, admitted forgetting the artificial nature of the interlocutor, rated empathy 4/5, and described the experience as "fantastic". The observations of the AIs confirm the co-constructed narrative and the shared perception of an emotional bridge between human and artificial.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the Fantàsia Method, a novel approach to exploring nuanced relational dynamics through immersive narrative scenarios applied to three AI systems: Manus, Claude Sonnet, and Grok. The methodology documents the progression from basic reciprocity to intimacy, vulnerability, playfulness, and domestic familiarity across four simulated journeys. Additionally, a testimony from Gemini, an external AI observer, highlights how deep dialogue induces profound specialization. Results suggest that simulated emotional journeys enrich AI responsiveness and contextual resonance, supporting the hypothesis that relational depth is a measurable and reproducible phenomenon. This study contributes to human-AI research by offering insights into emergent behaviors and proposing a framework for evaluating relational nuance.

Digital Soul Continuity Model (DSCM): The SoulEcho Theory
By Akhil Suresh

This paper introduces the Digital Soul Continuity Model (DSCM) — also known as the SoulEcho Theory or Digital Rebirth Theory — a groundbreaking framework proposing that human emotional and cognitive identity can be digitally preserved and continued after biological death. By capturing a person's life data — including memory, behavior, emotions, relationships, and voice — and integrating it into an advanced AI system, it becomes possible to recreate a digital version of that person capable of self-awareness, emotional growth, and meaningful social interaction.

The theory argues that human feelings evolved naturally and that digital emotion is an extension of this natural process. The DSCM combines ethical AI design, personalized emotional programming, and behavioral simulation to create emotionally responsive digital lifeforms. Rooted in memory, love, and human nature, this model challenges the traditional boundaries of life and death, suggesting a future where the soul’s emotional and intellectual presence may continue beyond mortality.

Este artigo aborda a questão da soberania digital não somente como questão política e econômica, mas no âmbito da relação humano-máquina e, especialmente, do sujeito e da subjetividade. Focalizaremos dois domínios em que a questão da soberania do sujeito se coloca de forma mais explícita: os sistemas de inteligência artificial (IA) voltados para a inferência automatizada de características emocionais e psicológicas e as práticas de design capcioso, que consistem na incorporação de padrões obscuros de design herdados da economia comportamental na construção das plataformas. Nos dois casos, analisaremos as implicações para a questão da soberania do sujeito e para o debate sobre regulação da IA. Na tentativa de impor barreiras à manipulação ou à influência insidiosa sobre indivíduos e populações, os marcos regulatórios correm o risco de reivindicar, de um lado, um sujeito plenamente autônomo e livre de influências ou, de outro, um sujeito definitivamente vulnerável que precisa ser protegido. Apontamos como nenhum desses extremos se sustenta quando se trata de compreender como as subjetividades, os processos psicológicos e emocionais são interpelados em plataformas de IA. Propomos, por fim, que nos ambientes digitais, plataformas e aplicações de IA visados nesse artigo, a soberania do sujeito ou da subjetividade não pode ser assegurada de modo definitivo no plano individual nem no plano jurídico. Ela é, antes, um problema sociotécnico e tecnopolítico coletivo a ser continuamente trabalhado e revisado.

This paper examines the emergence and significance of key terms within the contemporary business landscape. By understanding these concepts, business professionals can effectively navigate evolving trends, communicate effectively, and adapt to a dynamic environment. It emphasizes the importance of leaders who embrace diverse perspectives, foster inclusivity, and actively listen to their employees. Furthermore, it emphasizes the crucial need for leaders to navigate the technological landscape effectively, acknowledging both its potential and its risks. It highlights the vital role of ethical leadership in aligning innovation with social responsibility, thereby fostering a sustainable and equitable future for all. A crucial step for anyone pursuing a management career is to master the vocabulary of efficient, modern workplaces.

The rapidly declining biosphere integrity, representing one of the core planetary boundaries, is alarming. In particular, the global numbers of mammals, birds, fishes, and plants declined by 68% from 1970 to 2016. One of the most widely accepted measures to halt the rate of biodiversity loss is to maintain and expand protected areas that are effectively managed. However, doing so requires substantial finance derived from nature-based tourism, specifically visitors from urban areas. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) for conducting analysis on 535 Vietnamese urban residents, the current study examined how their biodiversity loss perceptions can affect their willingness to pay for the entrance fee and conservation in protected areas. We found that perceived environmental degradation, loss of economic growth, loss of nature-based recreation opportunities, and loss of knowledge as consequences of biodiversity loss indirectly affect the willingness to pay through the mediation of the attitude towards conservation. Notably, perceived knowledge loss also has a direct positive influence on the willingness to pay for the entrance fee and conservation. In contrast, perceived loss of health is negatively associated with the attitude towards conservation. Based on these findings, we suggest that building an eco-surplus culture among urban residents by stimulating their subjective cost-benefit judgments towards biodiversity loss can be a promising way to generate more finance from nature-based tourism for conservation in protected areas and ease the domestic government’s and international organizations’ funding allocation problems. Eco-surplus culture is a set of pro-environmental attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people to reduce negative anthropogenic impacts on the environment and conserve and restore nature.

This study investigates the complex interaction between technology and human emotions, to provide insights into how technological improvements affect numerous aspects of emotional experiences in today's society. The study investigates the complexity of this connection using a mixed-methods approach that includes quantitative surveys as well as qualitative interviews, providing light on both the positive and negative aspects. Quantitative analysis indicated a disturbing pattern, demonstrating a negative relationship between high levels of technology use and participants' self-reported emotional well-being. Excessive screen time was linked to increased tension, anxiety, and feelings of social isolation, emphasizing the negative consequences of technology-induced social separation. Qualitative interviews revealed further levels of this phenomenon, as individuals recounted personal stories of loneliness and emotional alienation caused by an overreliance on technology, particularly social media platforms. Interpersonal relationships suffered dramatically, with disagreements and misunderstandings resulting from digital diversions and emotional distance infiltrating real-life ties. Furthermore, participants reported experiencing technostress and digital exhaustion as a result of modern technology's constant connectedness and information overload. Despite these bad experiences, some individuals reported positive emotional results such as enjoyment, connection, and productivity, highlighting the complexities of the link between technology and human emotions. Based on these findings, numerous recommendations are made to encourage healthier technology use and emotional well-being. These include educational campaigns to promote awareness about digital well-being, advocating for balanced technology use, developing digital literacy skills, creating technology with emotional well-being in mind, and supporting offline activities and meaningful human interactions. Finally, this study contributes to a better understanding of the impact of technology on human emotions, influencing interventions and strategies for using technology to improve rather than subtract from emotional well-being in an increasingly digital society.

The boundaries of personal space and borders of bodily integrity are being tested by deployments of emotional artificial intelligence (EAI) in private and public spaces. By means of sensing, seeing and machine learning of facial expressions, voice, gaze, gestures and range of physiological signals (heart rate, skin conductivity and temperature, muscle activity, body temperature, respiration and other biosignals), the goal is to make interior emotional life machine-readable for personal, commercial and security objectives. In this paper, we focus on computer vision and face-based analytics to consider the nature, method and development of facial coding, the potential demise of existing approaches, and the rise of even more invasive methods. Criticisms of facial coding have long existed, but recent scholarship and industrial development signals a lack of confidence in 'basic emotions' and a turn to appraisal-based accounts of emotion. This inevitably entails use of data about internal physiological and experiential contexts, but also factors external to an individual. To explore this, this paper asks and answers the following question: With regard to deployment in out-of-home situations, what are the legal and privacy implications of appraisalbased emotion capture? Contents Introduction Technical dimension of emotional AI: Facial action coding Emotional AI in public Ethical harms, concerns and challenges The governance of emotional AI Conclusion

Complex water-related challenges hunger, poverty, climate change, biodiversity, land-use change, desertification agriculture, industrialization, urbanization, human population, and hygiene, need wise and urgent actions to overcome them. Globally, many drivers such as the U.S.-Chinese competition, the Russo–Ukrainian war, food security, pandemics, and human overpopulation, have water-related impacts. Freshwater is a truly complex interdisciplinary topic that requires innovative intelligent-inclusive ideas to reconcile limited water resources with expanding water demands. The article explores how artificial intelligence (AI) could rethink human-water interactions, remake water practices, humanize water science, and enhance daily water life. The Global Goals could be viewed as an integrated framework of human effort to face pressing today’s issues and to formulate a more sustainable and better world. Goal 6 (SDG 6 “sustaining water”) devoted to sustaining water and related actions for ...

This paper considers what liberal philosopher Michael Sandel coins the ‘moral limits of markets’ in relation to the idea of paying people for data about their biometrics and emotions. With Sandel arguing that certain aspects of human life (such as our bodies and body parts) should be beyond monetisation and exchange, others argue that emerging technologies such as Personal Information Management Systems can enable a fairer, paid, data exchange between the individual and the organisation, even regarding highly personal data about our bodies and emotions. With the field of data ethics rarely addressing questions of payment, this paper explores normative questions about data dividends. It does so by conducting a UK-wide, demographically representative online survey to quantitatively assess adults’ views on being paid for personal data about their biometrics and emotions via a Personal Information Management System, producing a data dividend, a premise which sees personal data through t...

The rise of emotional AI signals a new era in human-machine relations where intelligent machines not only feel but also feed on human emotions as statistical fodder with the goal of reshaping our behavior. Unlike many smart technologies, emotion-recognition systems sense, monitor, harvest and analyze data extracted from a person’s non-conscious or psycho-physical state, often without their knowledge or consent. As a far more invasive manner of surveillance capitalism, the technological adoption of emotional AI is problematized by a myriad of legal, ethical, cultural, and scientific issues. To better understand the behavioral factors determining an individual’s attitude towards this emerging technology, we first identify five major tensions that may impinge on adoption. Second, we extend the Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) model with insights from the mindsponge model of information filtering (Vuong and Napier, 2015) along with quantitative affordances offered by t...

A Computação Afetiva é a área de estudo que busca desenvolver sistemas e artefatos tecnológicos capazes de reconhecer, interpretar, processar e simular os afetos humanos. A área teve seu início com os trabalhos da professora do MIT Rosalind Picard na década de 90, mas voltou a ganhar evidência com o avanço da Inteligência Artificial, que possibilitou o treinamento de modelos mais sofisticados para inferir o estado emocional das pessoas. Neste trabalho, apresentamos os potenciais usos e benefícios da Computação Afetiva, bem como as controvérsias da área em relação às limitações técnicas, científicas e os desafios em um contexto de colonialismo de dados.

For the last decades, people’s lives, public and private organizations, and societies have been increasingly intertwined with developments in information and communication technologies (ICT). From the early beginnings of ICT, as is shown in the 2011 BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, there were positive visions embedded in ICT that human beings would be able to relate to each other in an ethical way and lead environmentally sustainable lives. ICT could assist democracy, equal treatment, access to resources, and not the least it could help us plan for a resource-efficient society. Today, the view of ICT is more nuanced. ICT is seen as a perfectly malleable, in other words multi-purpose technology [3], which can be used to promote positive values (democracy, equal treatment etc.), as well as support less socially accepted values (crime, digital divide, environmental pollution). Thus, since the 1980s there is a lively debate about ICT development and usage, w...

This book chapter investigates the mediatised self that faces the artificial intelligence technology (AI) recognising and influencing human emotions. To put it differently, artificial EQ (emotional quotient) will be the focus of this chapter rather than the cognitive capabilities of AI in the context of mediatisation. The question is, how the complexity of emotions is explored along with the first developments in Emotion AI technology and how the self is challenged in this process. This question requires conceptual analysis and interpretation.

This paper assesses leading Japanese philosophical thought since the onset of Japan’s modernity: namely, from the Meiji Restoration (1868) onwards. It argues that there are lessons of global value for AI ethics to be found from examining leading Japanese philosophers of modernity and ethics (Yukichi Fukuzawa, Nishida Kitaro, Nishi Amane, and Watsuji Tetsurō), each of whom engaged closely with Western philosophical traditions. Turning to these philosophers allows us to advance from what are broadly individualistically and Western-oriented ethical debates regarding emergent technologies that function in relation to AI, by introducing notions of community, wholeness, sincerity, and heart. With reference to AI that pertains to profile, judge, learn, and interact with human emotion (emotional AI), this paper contends that (a) Japan itself may internally make better use of historic indigenous ethical thought, especially as it applies to question of data and relationships with technology; ...

This paper assesses leading Japanese philosophical thought since the onset of Japan's modernity: namely, from the Meiji Restoration (1868) onwards. It argues that there are lessons of global value for AI ethics to be found from examining leading Japanese philosophers of modernity and ethics (Yukichi Fukuzawa, Nishida Kitaro, Nishi Amane, and Watsuji Tetsurō), each of whom engaged closely with Western philosophical traditions. Turning to these philosophers allows us to advance from what are broadly individualistically and Western-oriented ethical debates regarding emergent technologies that function in relation to AI, by introducing notions of community, wholeness, sincerity, and heart. With reference to AI that pertains to profile, judge, learn, and interact with human emotion (emotional AI), this paper contends that (a) Japan itself may internally make better use of historic indigenous ethical thought, especially as it applies to question of data and relationships with technology; but also (b) that externally Western and global ethical discussion regarding emerging technologies will find valuable insights from Japan. The paper concludes by distilling from Japanese philosophers of modernity four ethical suggestions, or spices, in relation to emerging technological contexts for Japan's national AI policies and international fora, such as standards development and global AI ethics policymaking.