STS seminar with Minna Ruckenstein, Chalmers STS
Lisa Lindén
Welcome to a Chalmers STS seminar with Minna Ruckenstein!
When: Wednesday June 3d, 15.15-17.00
Where: Seminar room Linnéplatsen, TME, Chalmers, Vera Sandahls allé 8
See below and attached.
Dehumanising the AI Chatbot as a Protective Gesture
By attending to the process of chatbot design, this talk shows how care orientation motivates the deliberate dehumanisation of the AI system as a protective gesture. This involves resisting anthropomorphisation by avoiding first-person claims and other cues of human-like agency. Rather than eliciting personal or emotionally sensitive disclosures, the system seeks to normalise emotional responses and provide low-stakes informational support. The chatbot is kept recognisably non-human, grounded in the recognition that AI-simulated empathy may operate as a form of deception and blur boundaries between human and machine. The aim is to resist such deception through careful prompt engineering that avoids human-like cues, limits emotional engagement and signals clearly that the user is interacting with a tool rather than a person.
This case illustrates how technologically mediated care is an ongoing process and aim, embedded in practical ethics and design decisions that define what AI systems do in a specific context and how boundaries of humanness and health are drawn. Moving towards care is difficult because prevailing digital infrastructures and related imaginaries favour hyper-personalised, anthropomorphised AI and thus constrain the realisation of protective design choices. Yet this difficulty underscores the importance of mobilising care as a critical lens. A care-oriented approach can evaluate whether communicative practices and technical configurations are arranged to protect and support collective wellbeing, while remaining attentive to the digital infrastructures already in place.
Best wishes,
Lisa
Associate Professor, Chalmers STS