What Human Emotion Are You?
TikTok personality quizzes, the 30-minute ick factor, digital rest stops, animal sentience, ghosts in the machine, and uncertain smiles
🫤 #humanfeelings
I see myself in this picture and I don’t like it! That was the general reaction to the “What Human Emotion Are You?” quiz that went viral this week on TikTok. The quiz starts with your preferred greeting and then goes on to more esoteric concerns like your relationship to space or the meta “is it okay to have feelings?” or the simply random, such as picking a life event from five bizarre options. The quiz was originally in Russian which might explain some of the strangeness.
You can take other variations on uQuiz—some producing more whimsical results like “lying in a meadow on a sunny day” or “the realization that you can feel yourself changing”— or you can follow along on TikTok with the hashtag #humanfeelings. My result was “anxiety” maybe because the quiz gives “a ghost of past data debacles” vibe. TikTok’s users might be too young to remember the Cambridge Analytica personality quiz scandal but it’s hard not to be data cautious despite being human emotion curious.
🤢 30-Minute Ick Factor
Okay, we’ve all done it—spent too much time on social media which is usually followed by a unique blend of regret, not covered in Daniel Pink’s four categories. Social media regrets are a custom blend of self-admonishment, private shame, FOMO, a dash of despair, and residual anxiety for good measure.
Thanks to new research from the University of Washington’s HCI group, we now know just when that feeling takes hold. According to study lead Amanda Baughan, social media triggers dissociation; a state of narrowed attention and reduced self-reflection. After 30 minutes spent on social media, people in the study started to feel a sense of disgust and disappointment in themselves. That’s the 30-minute ick factor.
Even though we know thousands of people are employed to keep you scrolling, swiping, and tapping, it is possible to minimize those bad feelings. TikTok already includes a nudge to take breaks and Twitter offers a way to make lists that can help you counter that perfectly calibrated feed. Don’t let the all-consuming cycle send you into a shame spiral though. Ultimately, the responsibility needs to shift to the companies themselves.
🛣 Digital Rest Stops
Has your latest doomscroll been interrupted by an invitation to watch a peaceful woodland scene or gaze at a steaming cup of tea or listen to tranquil ocean sounds? if so, then you’ve already encountered a digital rest stop—content that invites you to take a small break. Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz reported on the recent trend, adding that the virtual breathers reflect “users’ desires for permission to log off, without fully logging off.”
Digital rest stops are the latest way of peacing out online. There are also atmospheric online environments like Hipster Cafe and Tree.fm as well as bots that encourage breaks, whether for self-care or enjoyment of random colors or a dose of magical realism. The eyebleach subreddit is not, contrary to what you might think, so deeply unsettling that you’ll need to bleach your eyes afterward. Scroll through, and you'll find a photo of three dogs with their heads resting on each other or a bear cub doing a little jig among the videos contributed by 3.5 million people who want to help you with an emotional reset.
Can you counteract the 30-minute ick factor with digital rest stops and little puppies, kooky cats, and newborn zoo animals? Worth a try!
🐘 Animal (and Robot) Sentience
While we debate whether artificial intelligence is sentient and the LaMDA AI lawyers up, New York’s highest court considered whether an elephant qualifies as a legal (sentient) person. The Nonhuman Rights Project argued the animal’s case, noting that Happy was the first elephant to pass the self-recognition mirror test. Happy wasn’t granted personhood, but with more cases coming up in the United States, India, and Israel, it may be that human rights will start to apply to non-humans soon enough. Philosopher Peter Singer argued that, over the course of human history, people have expanded the circle of beings whose interests they are willing to value. Slavery was abolished. Women got the vote. Same-sex marriage was legalized. Taking a long view, it’s likely that views on animal, and possibly robot, rights will shift too.
🪦 The Ghost in the Machine
Last month, Takara Tomy introduced a smart speaker that imitates a parent’s voice so that the adorable little speech bubble bot can pitch in at bedtime. This month, Amazon takes familial deepfakes next-level. At a recent event, the company demonstrated Alexa reading a children’s story but in the voice of a dead grandparent rather than a living parent. This opens up all kinds of weird possibilities.
Typical scenario: Heartwarming memories and a little break for parents tired of reading Dragons Love Tacos or I Want My Hat Back.
Wish list: Your taciturn father posthumously says “I love you”.
Dystopian nightmare: Your grandmother’s voice is spreading disinformation, starring in porn, and scamming shoppers.
Or you become too attached to the voice, in the spirit of Black Mirror’s Be Right Back episode.
Even though it seems like sci-fi, these products draw inspiration from real-life experiments like Eugenia Kudya’s Luka chatbot (now it’s morphed into the popular Replika chatbot) and Martine Rothblatt’s BINA48 bot, both modeled on real people.
🤨 No More Uncertain Smiles
While Amazon tries to resurrect the dead, Microsoft lays a problematic technology to rest. In keeping with its responsible AI guidelines, Microsoft has decided to limit the use of facial recognition that guesses emotions from facial expressions. Facial expression is not a reliable indicator of a subjective emotional state, at least not without lots of context, so Microsoft is moving to phase out its use along with age and gender indicators.
IBM moved to limit the use of facial recognition in 2020 because of the potential for racial profiling and civil rights abuses. So far, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon (and the myriad other smaller companies developing the tech) have not moved to limit its use but it may be that we are seeing the emergence of new industry norms!
.･ﾟﾟ･°˖✧ That’s all the feels for this week! ✧˖°･ﾟﾟ･.
xoxo
Pamela 💗