Much of the research on artificial intelligence and human emotion focuses on potential negative implications and emotional states such as depression, with less focus on joy, gratitude, and connection. But Penn Integrates Knowledge professor Desmond Upton Patton says he and collaborators envision a future where people’s experiences—from social media to banking—are shaped by systems that seek to amplify joy.
“Current tech business models focus primarily on engagement without regard for whether such engagement stems from joy or distress, anger, and frustration,” they write in a new paper published in The Paris Journal on AI & Digital Ethics.
In the paper, the researchers present a framework for instead considering how to incorporate joy in the design and deployment of AI models. They are specifically focused on empowering marginalized communities, who experience greater bias from large language models. The goal of the framework is to assist engineers, designers, and researchers in developing AI models that promote more nuanced, compassionate AI interactions.
“We define joy as both an emotion and a tool for liberation, freedom-building, and reimagining possibility,” says Patton, who has primary appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and School of Social Policy and Practice. “A joy-centered approach to AI challenges researchers and engineers to design models that recognize human strengths, elevate resilience, and foster thriving digital environments.”
In a study that informed the creation of the framework, researchers recruited New York City university students and Black Harlem residents to use Integrating Emotional Stories Online, a social media platform developed by computer scientists, linguists, and social work researchers to examine how people express grief and distress online.
Prompted to share their emotions and events that triggered them, the 125 users shared 949 posts from February to December 2022. The most striking theme the researchers identified was joy, with users writing about hope, gratitude, love, ease, and spirituality as coping mechanisms.
“People experiencing loss still recognize, seek, and value moments of joy,” Patton says. “That insight pushed us to consider how AI could intentionally optimize for joy, especially in a world where trauma, grief, and pain are part of everyday life.”
Their framework lays out how joy could be centered in team creation, conception, design and updates, and deployment of AI models. For example, they say that teams creating AI models should include not only engineers and computational modelers but also social scientists such as sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists.
Read more about Upton’s research at Penn Today.
