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<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:14.666667px">Colin Allen (UC Santa Barbara)</span></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><font size="5">“Appearance or Reality: Does AI Need Emotions?”</font></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:14.666667px">UC Merced Philosophy Speaker Series</span></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:14.666667px">Friday, March 14, 2025</span></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:14.666667px">3:30-5pm SSM 116</span></div>
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<div>Commercially available AI systems for the detection of sentiment or emotions from human faces, text, and non-verbal behavior are already widely deployed, even if they don’t fully live up to the marketing hype. At the same time, generative AI models are
now capable of producing text and images that lead some people to attribute emotions to them. Such capacities are often argued to be important for effective human-machine interaction, but the actual limitations of current systems mean that their deployment
comes with some hazards. Furthermore, these capacities do not amount to machines having their own emotions, a potential development that is regarded by some commentators as even more hazardous. Perhaps incrementally improving the capacities of machines to
detect emotions and to appear to have them suffices for smooth human-machine interaction but a further question exists about whether human-level intelligence crucially depends on emotions, or whether it exists despite emotions. I will argue that the likely
answer to this question is the former — emotions are crucial to intelligence — but answering this question definitively requires conceptual, theoretical, and experimental work at the interface of philosophy and cognitive science. I end by sketching the research
program that this entails, and questioning the wisdom of pursuing such a research program. </div>
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<div>This event is free and open to the public. If you’re a student at another school or community college faculty, contact Dan Hicks (<a href="mailto:danhicks@ucmerced.edu">danhicks@ucmerced.edu</a>) for directions and a parking subsidy. </div>
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<div>Dan Hicks</div>
<div>Associate Professor and Chair</div>
<div>Department of Philosophy</div>
<div>University of California, Merced</div>
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<div>Pronouns: they/them/their</div>
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