‘Ai: Who’s Looking After Me?’ gathers a variety of integrated works with multiple disciplines ranging from healthcare, justice system, pet care, and discusses how these aspects were shaped differently with the use of AI. One of the artworks that drew my attention was ‘Does AI Care?’ by Sofie Layton, who worked with young people who suffered from cancer at an early age while sharing their experiences and evaluating whether AI could provide care to patients during their hard times. The work simulated a patient’s waiting room at a hospital, with an audio combining young adults’ reflections on topics about AI, care and cancer with an AI generated response.
AI is widely used in the medical industry, for instance in medical imaging, radiotherapy, and surgery. AI can provide precise and professional support to doctors in making life-changing decisions, but the topic of whether this machine can emotionally support patients is still a big debate. Most people show strong resistance to the fact that AI could replace doctors, as they believe human interactions are where patients gain hope and care. Yet this artwork has brought me new thoughts of thinking that the sense of ‘care’ may not only merely come from human warmth, but also from detailed prediction of the disease that AI could provide to patients. The objectivity of information that AI equips may in a way calm patients’ uncertainties and unknown worries.
S male voice 0:59 ‘If cancer was something it’d be like the Mariana Trench, just a deep abyss that we don’t understand, or like a black hole, just- we can’t see into it. And if it was a sound, I’d say it’d be silence – because we don’t hear it coming. It just… happens.’
One of the young participants who joined this project raised his terrifying worries about how cancer can be a silent bomb without any omen and forecast, and AI could act as the role of a carer predicting the future. Nevertheless, what if patients are over-reliant on AI? And what if the ‘care’ from AI is just an illusion that gives false hope to patients? In the audio that gathered young adults’ cancer experiences, one raised the concern of how AI is more advanced and complicated than in the past when humans were unable to understand AI language. As a result, who would bear the responsibility if medical malpractice made by AI occurs? If that is doctors’ duty, yet doctors cannot understand AI, what can doctors do to justify themselves? The adaptation of AI in surgery has degraded the power of humans and lost the dominance of decision making in a way that is too complex for humans to conquer.
AI Chat 3:43 ‘AI can provide certain types of care. But it is important to understand that AI is not a substitute for human interaction and empathy. ’
In this artwork, Sofie Layton tried to mix and match AI responses with human responses towards the same topic. At first, I was unaware that one of the responses came from AI generated response. Right after listening to the whole piece and rereading the description, I was surprised how AI chat has perfectly blended into human response. We often assume that AI can only provide objective information to humans, yet it contains subjectivity as it is made by tech designers where bias from humans is unconsciously coded into algorithms. In the above response from AI regarding the topic of AI and care, there were also stereotypes and opinions about whether AI can substitute human interaction. Similarly, Safiya Umoja Noble suggested in her book ‘Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism’ that Google’s search engine contains biased search that favours the company’s economic interests and profitability. Algorithmic bias does exist in a superficially objective search engine and AI. Hence, how Layton tried to merge AI and human responses into a single audio has cleverly addressed this issue and obscured audiences’ minds.
I have yet to find the answer to whether AI could provide this ‘Caring Blue’ to patients or not, and I doubt that the cold, digital machine can show emotional and sentimental care to the ones who are suffering from diseases. Nonetheless, one thing I believe is crystal-clear is that AI and human can co-exist at the same time, where both can work on their talents and paint a rainbow in the gloomy medical industry.
Read Full Transcript of audio piece here