Supervisor: Fan Liang, Assistant Professor of Media
Student Researchers
Xinran Lai is majoring in Media and Arts (Creative Practice) from UG Class of 2023, her research interests are located in the fields of digital humanities and computational art with a focus on cyber-feminism and de-anthropocentrism.
Leiyuan Tian is majoring in Media and Arts (History) from UG Class of 2023, her research interests are located in the fields of new media and digital communication with a focus on online fandoms and marginalised communities.
Christine Sui is majoring in Behavioral Science (Psychology) from UG Class of 2023, her research interests are mainly focused on death anxiety and anxiety intervention with digital art methods. All of the three research assistants are responsible for the interviews and literature review.
About the Project
In recent years, voice-based technologies such as smart speakers have emerged as a new type of media with which people socially engage for a variety of purposes. For example, Alibaba’s AliGenie, Baidu’s Xiaodu, and Xiaomi’s Xiao are quickly being adopted in everyday life and integrated into other devices (e.g., vehicles and televisions) in China. This new type of human-machine communication (HMC) underpinned by artificial intelligence indicates that people are speaking with human-like virtual machines as they navigate almost every aspect of their lives. This project attempts to explore how Chinese users make sense of AI-based technologies that possess voice without a body as communicators.
