My enquiry explores how the act of love through giving is changing in the age of AI, and how this influence, distort and mimick human relationships. Drawing on both personal memory and speculative design, I investigate the emotional gap between artificial and authentic forms of care.
Through my studio practice, I worked with AI tools to create gift suggestions based on real emotional situations. These were often strange, funny, or emotionally off. I then visualised these AI-generated gifts through short videos and contrasted them with real gifts I’ve given or received — ones filled with memory, care, and cultural meaning.
My studio practice combines video, object documentation, storytelling, and sound to create a poetic-critical space to show the difference between something made with emotion and something made by an algorithm. My project is both personal and critical, asking where the line is between connection and simulation. I work with generative tools not to celebrate them, but to reveal their limits. For translation, i take real emotional contexts, like missing my mum or saying sorry, and translate them into prompts for AI. The AI responds with gifts, but the emotional intent gets distorted in the translation.
This enquiry is relevant to designers, artists, and anyone reflecting on how technology reshapes our relationships. It asks what emotional labour looks like in a digital world — and what still resists automation.
Questions:
- What happens when emotional labour — like giving a gift — is outsourced to a system?
- What is the value of imperfection in human expression?
- Are we slowly losing authorship over how we express care? Who Gets to Mediate Our Emotions?
- Emotional Labour in the Age of Convenience. Are we moving toward emotional shortcuts instead of emotional depth?
- What does it cost — not just emotionally, but ecologically?
- Are we building a future where emotional gestures have a carbon footprint?