Ricerc@Sapienza

Artificial Intelligence (AI), represents a hot topic, so that for instance it has been recently launched the first national PhD program in AI, involving major Italian Universities and Institutions, and among them Sapienza (www.phd-ai.it). AI application is involving many operative fields, but are we ready for such AI intrusion in ¿creative¿ and ¿evalutative/normative¿ fields, like Literature and Ethics (medical), traditionally seen as human domains? This experimental question is at the base of the present project, that aims at investigating conscious and, mostly, unconscious reactions to pretended AI/human elaborations. In fact, such reactions, collected through neurophysiological acquisition (electroencephalography, heart rate and galvanic skin responses) and Implicit Reaction Test, could represent a biomarker of acceptance or resistance toward AI introduction in traditionally seen humanistic fields. Concerning the medical framework, inside the Museum of the History of Medicine at Sapienza we will test participants reaction to diagnosis/prescription/communication referred as made by AI or a clinician. Concerning Literature we will test the reaction to pairs of poetry texts one referred as made by AI and the other by a poet. In order to dig into the possible factors that could potentially influence the conscious and unconscious reaction, that could absolutely diverge as suggested by scientific literature, on the base of established and current research we selected some variables that will be focused in the study: i) Story-telling; ii) Different sensory influence on aesthetic/ethical perception (for poetry stimuli: listening/reading); iii) Expertise/Background of participants; iv) Order effect (previous studies suggest an order effect when alternating AI- and human-created artworks). In addition, the project will analyze most recent ethical and epistemological debates and conceptualizations on AI/human interaction, treated also in a workshop at the end of project.