Understanding AI's Limitations in Emotional Intelligence

Humans are relational as well as rational. This means we cannot devalue our emotions, spirituality, culture and ways we communicate because it is in HOW we exchange information that a great deal of information is in fact also exchanged. Where one believes the brain is a computer, there is a potential lack of recognition for how other parts of the human body have autonomy from, but in symbiosis to, the brain. Where one denies non-Western traditions based in relationality versus rationality, this is marginalizing bias that causes harm. There is a great deal of focus on avoiding risk in AI which is a critical area to study. But the hidden, paradigm level ignorance (intended or unintended) of how billions of people frame humanity belies irresponsible design. Where the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) isn't recognized in AI Systems design, the process of relationality can be ignored. Meaning, how pheremonal level information between two humans is passed is a vital part of how we actually communicate. We have all experienced wisdom provided by someone else without words. Or wisdom based on a gesture, a smile, a vibe, or a consciousness provided with a piece of "information" one could read or learn from an algorithmic tool. But information provided without relationality means we deny our full humanity. Rationality and Relationality are fundamental parts of who we are. Yin and Yang. Paul and John. A recognition of beautiful balance. To hear from two expert voices on this, check out the brilliant paper, Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of “AI” by Professor Emily M. Bender,  (https://lnkd.in/eAEu4sVa) and the seminal 2020 paper from Sabelo Mhlambi, From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical and Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance (https://lnkd.in/eWXBTnTq). Let's stop denying a core of who we are and how we communicate. Being relational can be hard because it means caring for ourselves and others. The good news is we can only do it (be relational) together. Emily M. Bender Sabelo Sethu Mhlambi KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz Marisa Zalabak AJung Moon Anja K. Raja Chatila Chuck Metz, Jr. Danny Devriendt Scarlett Lanzas, MPA

Does AI make co-creation obsolete? If you have access to the world's information and can interact with it through artificial intelligence, 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨-𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞? 𝐖𝐞𝐥𝐥, 𝐲𝐞𝐬. Because even if you can have limitless virtual avatars, you are not designing for them. You're designing for the people at the center of the problem. People. Not machines. 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒅𝒐 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑨𝑰 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕? 🙄 𝐄𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: The people experiencing the problem and nuanced context of the challenge you are solving have an emotional experience. They can tell stories that connect to others in the room and relate that experience in a way that machines can't. Only humans can feel emotions and only other humans can understand the motivations that come from those emotions. 💚 𝐄𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐲: When you connect with other people and 'get' their point of view; when you hear their stories and live vicariously in their shoes, you make a connection that allows you to collaborate at a deeper, almost visceral level. Machines may be able to fake empathy, but they'll never have feelings so they'll never have empathy. 💍 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: This one is easy; for now. If you are using AI in your design process, it's something you drive, it doesn't actually interact with YOU. You interact with IT. Other humans engage actively, our faces light up when we are listening or reacting to what's being said. We have gazillions more threads of connection than a computer ever could. Even if you can afford to have an AI robot in the room, you won't have genuine creative engagement. 🔋 𝐄𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐲: We've all been to a meeting where you felt the space was just flat. Conversely, we've also been to a gathering where the atmosphere is just electric. AI contributes zilch to that equation. Creating and riding the wave of human energy is critical to creating solutions for complex problems in the moment. If you want to accelerate finding solutions to a problem, AI can be a companion but you need other humans to create the energy for acceleration. Check out our article on co-creation and facilitation. I would love to hear your thoughts on what the role of AI is in co-creation or in your work in general. https://lnkd.in/ePuTrYBB Steven B., Manfred Gollent, Amy Heymans, Arne van Oosterom, Bre Przestrzelski, Ezequiel Williams #AI #CoCreation #HumanCenteredDesign #CoDesign #Facilitation

Will AI add emotional value to customer interactions or dilute essential emotional connections? Incorporating generative AI is all the rage in Sales right now. Overnight, I see customer-facing roles use AI to write emails, pitches, and call/meeting scripts. Building trust, credibility, and emotional connection are critical aspects of effective selling. IF the closing of a deal requires the salesperson to interact with the prospect in a live conversation (online meeting, on the phone, or in person), many salespeople will fall flat on their faces with their prospects if they rely on AI for all their written communications. Using AI to write all your text-based communication is like the play Cyrano de Bergerac- someone else writing love letters on your behalf to win the love of a woman. It's not really you communicating with the prospect... it's not really you that they have fallen in love with. Suppose a salesperson relies on AI to craft emotionally intelligent messaging and content but needs to work on their EQ and communication skills. In that case, as soon as the salesperson interacts live with a buyer, the buyer will realize that the salesperson is fake and ill-equipped to communicate effectively in real life. Trust and credibility are out the window, and so is your deal. AI will make emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self regulation, and communication skills even more critical in longer sales cycle deals, renewals, and expansion sales. Don't let AI make you lazy. You have to practice being a compassionate and effective communicator. Do the work (I can help you) to be a better communicator who is attuned to the buyer.

🌎Embracing Our Ingenuity in the Age of GenAI ⚡️ Looking back at memories, I stumbled upon an old #botjoy, a memento from my days as a Qlik #Luminary. This reminded me of the significance of those "Aha" moments, which are so pivotal in our journeys as leaders, creators, and innovators. As we get deeper into #GenAI, it's crucial to acknowledge its limitations – not as blockers, but as signposts. Here are 5 key aspects that remain distinctly to us: 1. Emotional Intelligence: While AI can simulate empathy and understand emotions to some extent, it cannot genuinely feel emotions or form personal relationships. 2. Creativity and Innovation: AI generates content and ideas based on existing data and patterns. It cannot create truly original ideas or art in the same way a human can, where inspiration is not solely data-driven. The leap of innovation - connecting disparate ideas in novel ways - is still a human domain. 3. Consciousness and Moral Decisions: Self-awareness, consciousness and Ethical judgments remain unique to humans, something beyond GenAI's capabilities. 4. Contextual Understanding: Understanding the nuances of human culture and emotions often eludes AI. 5. Complex Choices and Adapting to Change: AI lags in decisions requiring deep insights into human experiences, societal norms and unpredictable environments where the rules and data patterns it learned no longer apply. As we integrate AI more into our businesses and lives, let's do so with a deep appreciation for those unique strengths that only we, as humans, can bring to the table. SDG Group USA #keepmovingforward #AnalyticsDrivenDecisions #GoBeyond Thanks Gillian Farquhar for having me us a Qlik #Luminary

If a coworker asked you for a vacation recommendation, would you first want to know her shopping history, birth order, and favorite music artist? No. You’d probably tell her how much you loved your time in the Cayman Islands. You can respond with relevance without knowing everything about someone’s historical data. Yet we aren’t developing AI to respond with empathy. Artificial intelligence has been striving to make our lives easier for a decade—schedules our meetings, reminds us of dinner in the oven, and even books flights for much-needed getaways. In 2024, users expect AI to deliver near-magical experiences. To deliver on these fantastic expectations, AI needs to get personal. It needs to understand our preferences and behaviors, combined with situational context. One of the biggest challenges is training AI. Researchers at Cornell University found that well-intentioned “empathetic AIs” often adopt the biases and stereotypes displayed by people. While mass amounts of data help AI respond in a near-human way, real humans interact with greater nuance than any one data point can illustrate. AI ought to understand people better, not know more about them. It shouldn’t require constant additions of past data to understand current situations—and then dig deeper. It’s what we expect, after all. We get frustrated when chatbots fail to understand our requests, and we call our devices ‘stupid’ when they don’t “get” our joke. We treat our devices like real people, and develop elaborate personas in our minds. We form emotional bonds with these personas—Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT are names we use in conversation. We treat them like people, because we instinctively understand the importance of connection. Finding or creating empathy fosters a meaningful point of connection between us and the AI tools intended to better our lives. We want people building AI to see us as individuals, not as data points in a group. Imagine an empathetic AI trained to interpret tone and facial expressions: • If you sound hurried, it doesn’t offer trivial information • If you seem upset, it doesn’t make jokes • If your eyes are red, it offers softer responses • If you have a smile, it sounds chipper When someone throws a wrench in your day, you want AI to help, not add to the frustration. An empathetic AI would respond to you differently on your good days than bad days. What’s more, it could follow up to find additional ways to ease your burdens or evaluate your mental state after particularly challenging days. How might we build AI to empathize with us, not just try to replace us?

Organizations are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize emotions in people. However, emotion recognition is based on controversial assumptions about emotions and their measurability. If it is used anyway, it poses risks and ethical questions - says Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (Dutch DPA) in new report. ◆ It's not always clear how AI systems recognize emotions, nor whether the results are reliable. Despite the growth of these applications, people are also not always aware that emotion recognition is being used, nor are they always aware of the data used. ◆ The use of emotion recognition can lead to discrimination, loss of autonomy, privacy violations, and negative impacts on human dignity. The technology is often not transparent, and people may not know it is being used. ◆ In education and the workplace, emotion recognition based on biometrics is banned under the EU AI Act since February 2025. In other areas, it is considered high-risk and subject to strict requirements. Pic by ChatGPT https://lnkd.in/eNhuNKH7

GenAI chatbots, despite their advancements, are prone to making mistakes in various ways, stemming from their inherent limitations. Many find chatting with LLMs like ChatGPT offers significant potential in enhancing the speed of delivery and empowering ease-of-use experiences. Many use these tools, without understanding that misinformation and disinformation can arise due to flawed training data or inadequate grounding. These LLMs or foundation models, that are used to create these chat interfaces while extremely useful, lack emotional intelligence, and morality. Recognizing these limitations is essential for designing effective and responsible AI and GenAI chatbot interactions. Let's explore how these limitations manifest in three key areas: Misinformation and Disinformation: Chatting with your LLM interface, otherwise, some call it an AI chatbot can inadvertently propagate misinformation or disinformation due to their reliance on the data they're trained on. If the training data contains biased or incorrect information, the chatbot may unknowingly provide inaccurate responses to users. Additionally, without proper grounding, where prompts are based on high-quality data sets, AI chatbots may struggle to discern between reliable and unreliable sources, leading to further dissemination of false information. For instance, if a chatbot is asked about a controversial topic and lacks access to accurate data to form its response, it might inadvertently spread misinformation. Lack of Emotional Intelligence and Morality: AI chatbots lack emotional intelligence and morality, which can result in insensitive or inappropriate responses. Even with extensive training, they may struggle to understand the nuances of human emotions or ethical considerations. Similarly, in scenarios involving moral dilemmas, AI chatbots may provide responses that overlook ethical considerations, as they lack the ability, or simply cannot perceive right from wrong in a human sense. Limited Understanding and Creativity: Despite advancements in natural language processing, AI chatbots still have a limited understanding of context and may struggle with abstract or complex concepts. This limitation hampers their ability to engage in creative problem-solving or generate innovative responses. Without grounding in diverse and high-quality data sets, AI chatbots may lack the breadth of knowledge necessary to provide nuanced or contextually relevant answers. Consequently, they may provide generic or irrelevant responses, especially in situations that require creativity or critical thinking. When systems like this are pushed to go beyond, or asked to be creative. #genai #AI #chatbots 𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲: The views expressed in this post are my own. The views within any of my posts, or articles are not those of my employer or the employers of any contributing experts. 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲 👍 this post? Click 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗹 icon 🔔 for more!

If you have between 5 and 15 years of experience in the tech industry, then this post is for you. I hired close to a 100 people over the past 2-3 years and more than 95% of them were either straight out of college or with less than 5 years of work exp. Why did I not hire a lot of senior engineers with 5,10, 15 years of exp? To say it very bluntly, in most cases I did not find enough value to justify the 4x to 5x more cost than a fresher. I think AI/ML are not replacing all human jobs, they are only going to replace the highly paid humans where their current pay is only a factor of number of years of one-dimensional work experience. With my 25 years of experience, I try to teach young people technology, I try to teach them how to write emails or write a good resume or an article or write a good piece of software or good documentation, or how to file a good bug report etc.…all of which AI can do better job than me…so why do they need me? Moreover, as a senior person, as I started getting older, my ability or enthusiasm to learn new things every day has been decreasing and my experience continues to teach me why things don’t work when done in a certain way and it creates narrower thinking. But the AI machine does the exact opposite. The more data and time you give it, the more effectively it learns and broadens its thinking! So, what can I do as a senior engineer to continue to stay highly paid and employed? The only way to compete is by developing strengths in the areas of weakness of the opponent. So, what are the weaknesses of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? While the Intelligence is the strength, the weakness is that it is Artificial, while the Learning is the strength, the weakness is that it’s still a Machine. What is the one most valuable thing that the experienced person has that a rookie does not have? It’s not knowledge as Knowledge is now free and available on demand for anyone…Its TIME, the number of years the senior person spent on the job. So, the trick really is how can you spend that time to make yourself indispensable? You should create a strong personal brand which takes many years to build, create a large enough professional network, learn new things in new dimension every day, leadership, better communication skills. You should travel a lot, learn about various cultures and various points of view, learn about human emotions, learn about how to effectively influence people, how to provide the emotional support that young people need, because that is the only support they need from seniors these days, rest all ChatGPT can provide. If you really think about this, AI/ML are created by humans to take over the humans serving the needs of humans. The person who can teach how to solve a complex math problem will be replaced by a machine, but a person who can inspire/motivate someone to solve a problem will not. The people who can really understand and can drive humans cannot easily be replaced by machines!

In this thought-provoking piece, the author delves into the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in personal decision-making, specifically in the context of emotional and relationship advice. The advent of AI chatbots has revolutionized how people seek guidance, even in matters of the heart. This article presents firsthand experiences from a therapist's practice where patients have consulted chatbots before seeking professional help. While AI chatbots can provide practical, unbiased advice, the author raises concerns about their increasing influence. The significant issues are the lack of empathy, personal understanding, and the potential for misinformation. As we continue incorporating AI into our lives, it's vital to consider the risks involved and the irreplaceable value of genuine human connection. Here are some key takeaways from the piece: 💬 AI chatbots are increasingly being consulted for personal advice. 💔 The results of chatbot advice on love and relationships have been mixed. 🧠 Therapists express concerns about the implications of AI entering the therapy business. 🤔 While AI may articulate things like humans, the goal and the approach can differ significantly. 🤝Despite technological advances, human connection and understanding remain irreplaceable. #AIChatbots #EmotionalAdvice #ArtificialIntelligence #Therapy #HumanConnection #RelationshipAdvice #MentalHealth #TechInfluence #FutureOfTherapy #EthicalConcerns

We've all experienced them: chatbots, those virtual assistants promising a seamless customer experience. But when these AI-powered interactions go wrong, the consequences can be far graver than a frustrating conversation. Air Canada recently learned this the hard way, facing a PR nightmare after their chatbot quoted the wrong prices for which they were held accountable, which raises a crucial question: are chatbots worth the risk, especially without Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) expertise at the helm? While chatbots hold immense potential, poorly configured algorithms can perpetuate harmful biases, alienate customers, and ultimately cost your company dearly. Here's why: 1. Algorithmic Bias: Chatbots learn from data, often reflecting societal biases in the training data that can lead to discriminatory language, unfair treatment of specific demographics, and a breakdown in trust. 2. Lack of Empathy: Chatbots, despite advancements, need help understanding the nuances of human emotion. Culturally insensitive responses or an inability to adapt to diverse communication styles can leave customers feeling unheard and frustrated, damaging brand loyalty. 3. Accessibility Gaps: Not everyone interacts with technology in the same way. Chatbots that lack accessibility features for individuals with disabilities can create barriers to customer service and violate legal requirements. #techconsultancy #DEI #AI #genai #biasfree #chatbot #accessibility #economicinclusion