Introspective AI

Findings & Implications

Participants had varying attitudes toward the potential role of AI services in their introspective practice. Our study showed that devising concepts with controversial design traits can improve understanding of the design space, boundaries, and social acceptabilities. Next, we summarize key findings and suggest opportunities for future HCI research and design.

• Contributing data and anticipating results
  Participants valued having more agency over what and how data is collected and that these acts were often perceived as opportunities to prompt introspection. Participants appreciated the ongoing dialogue about their data and valued the qualities of IAI services that invited them to be creative with those accounts.
• Balancing curational control
  They also appreciated the IAI services that made their data malleable and tangible through both direct and implicit forms of interaction.
• Manipulation and revision as co-creation
  Participants valued tweaking, exaggerating, and re-contextualizing their digital profiles with the help of AI tools, which could lead to co-creative cycles of manifesting, discovering, and contemplating new aspects of their identity.

• Distrusting analytic perspectives
  Theme 2 located a nuanced tension concerning how an IAI presents information to the user. For participants, it was highly desired for an IAI to reveal patterns and introduce new perspectives on one’s life; however, it was perceived as unacceptable to be told what these patterns might definitively mean. Participants wanted to have the opportunity to be more involved in an IAI’s decision-making process and wanted options for ‘opting in’ and ‘tuning’ the degree to which an IAI service leveraged machine analysis for introspection.
• Confrontational Perspectives
  Surprisingly, participants also largely appreciated when the IAI exhibited bold and cheeky attitudes. These qualities were perceived as productive in pushing them out of their comfort zones, diverting from the status quo affirmational aims of most commercial applications.
• Taking perspectives in—or not
  Yet, the more seasoned introspective practitioners expressed concern for less experienced users who could fall prey to technologically determined “self-fulfilling prophecies,” marking areas that must be handled carefully.
• Abstract & Interpretable Perspectives
  Participants voiced their desire to move beyond ways of rational self-analysis as they seemed to be unsatisfied with their current reflective practices with personal data (e.g., via journaling and self-tracking apps).

• Supporting Presence and Habits
  Many participants gravitated towards IAI services that were embodied in physical devices for their intentional, solitary focus on specific methods. Here, persistent, self-contained, safeguarded experiences were envisioned to nurture new and novel introspective rituals—they were often described as desired alternatives to smartphone apps that dominate the current design space.
• Supporting Temporal Connections and Trajectories
  Some participants envisioned longer-term human-technology relations with the IAI services where the contemplative rewards could deepen over time. They expressed enthusiasm for tools that could help them to explore temporal interrelations among their past-, present- and future selves.
• More than just a user
  Lastly, participants expressed desires to socially share resources generated by IAI services as well as participate more directly in the development of IAI models that extend to broader communities of practice – both of which highlight key needs not well supported by currently available AI applications and services.