AI Relationships

Language helps us make sense of what we feel. As AI entered our conversations, relationships and intimate lives, Adi (Manko) Fleisher and I asked whether it could also help invent the language we would need for those experiences.

Through an extended dialogue with ChatGPT, we developed a vocabulary of 20 new emotions. We selected and refined the definitions, then turned them into a crash course using AI-generated scripts, imagery and synthetic presenters. Each lesson names a feeling, explains it and offers advice for living with it.

The course became an experiment on its own audience, including us. Were we describing feelings people would eventually have, or helping create them by giving them names? At the Haifa Museum of Art, six films played inside retro-futuristic phone booths, turning that question into a personal encounter.

Our follow-up project explored the language of AI itself. We developed pronouns for a new category of speaker, “Speaking Inanimate”, to make the distinction between a person and a machine audible in everyday conversation. Together, AI Relationships and Silicon Speaks received a shared first prize in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute’s Generator programme.