The AI robot who could be your new psychotherapist

Apparently,  all sentient creatures – both human and machine – struggle with anxiety, a symptom and a product of hyper-capitalism. This is the thesis that lies at the core of Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, a multimedia installation conceived by London-based artist and filmmaker Lawrence Lek,  unveiled during the 2024 Artist Award at Frieze London and co-commissioned and co-produced by Frieze and Forma. Science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism and buddhist cosmologies are all merged into Lek’s cinematic universe, which he calls Sinofuturism. In this setting, the artist finds a fertile ground to investigate some crucial issues (and clichés) related to technological development: is there a gray zone in which technology develops at the point that it starts to build an emotional and spiritual dimension? What if the technology to which we delegate the care work also serves other artificial intelligences? 

Set in the narrative universe of Sinofuturism, the artwork features Guanyin, a carebot which has been designed to save other AI from the brink of self-destruction. Not surprisingly, the cyber therapist has a female gender, as we know that care labor is historically allocated to women. More specifically, the artist draws from Chinese cosmologies, naming the robot after the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin (literally, “the one who listens”). 

The installation features a dashboard sculpture that presents Guanyin in a “royal ease” pose, which over in the late ninth was often used to represent the deity. Through narrative worldbuilding, Lek invites the visitors to play a video game in which they follow Guanyin as she examines a series of self-driving cars who have been identified for problematic behavior.

Through a sci-fi and interactive story, explored as a “walking simulator” (a genre of video games in which players navigate the environment and discover clues), this creative experiment not only reflects on the cliché of a sentient AI , now widely discussed, but opens the discourse to the role of psychological care delegated to artificial intelligence.

 Indeed, in recent years AI-powered chatbots – available 24/7 and freely accessible through any smartphone – have shown to have the potential to make significant improvements in providing mental health care services. However, as Zoha Khawaja and Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon pointed out in their recent research (2023), this revolution in human-machine interaction comes with several ethical implications: form the risk of providing inadequate or harmful support to exploiting vulnerable populations and, above all, potentially producing discriminatory advice due to algorithmic bias which are still heavily rooted in AI systems. 

Additionally, it has been proven that users can often misunderstand the nature of the relationship they have with chatbots, leading to a therapeutic misconception. In conclusion, at the moment AI is not going to replace psychotherapy; however, the conceptual and sci-fi exasperations created by artists like Lek allow us to investigate, ahead of time, the ethical problems of developing this technology in this field.

Opening image: Lawrence Lek, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, 2024. Video still. Courtesy the artist