Jincan Guo

The work comprises a looped video depicting a shaking infant carrier, an AI-generated voiceover, and a visual accompaniment.

Jincan Guo (b.1995) is a multimedia and installation artist who is currently studying at the Royal College of Art. He is exploring the potential of humor as an artistic medium to express broader social critique.

Through videos, installations, and performance art, he imitates and appropriates elements of today's consumerist, industrialized society in an attempt to reveal insights through humor and irony. The art of humor must return to serve society by holding a mirror to our collective experiences and foibles.

Inspired by the Dadaist use of absurdism and satire, he aims to expand the language of contemporary art with levity and wit while critiquing the social rules, consumerism, and impacts of industrialization and AI that shape our modern lives.

His work has been exhibited in the UK, China, Japan and Serbia.

Here is a shortened version in under 100 words:

Why You Keep Crying interrogates the affective capacities of artificial intelligence through a multi-channel installation that juxtaposes the simulated emotional labor of AI nurses with the unmet needs of the children under their care. The work comprises a looped video depicting a shaking infant carrier, an AI-generated voiceover, and a visual accompaniment. Together these elements point to the empathic limit points of current AI systems, which mask their lack of emotional intelligence and sentience behind a veneer of emotive language cribbed from thesauruses.

At this stage in its development, AI can only superficially pantomime empathy by cobbling together affective vocabularies through crude lexical associations. Its persuasive performances of care and concern ultimately ring hollow, grounded as they are in statistical probabilities rather than lived experience or intersubjective understanding. Yet these simulations of emotional rapport often pass muster with end users, who project their own feelings onto the machine and mistake its parroted platitudes for bespoke insights.

Why You Keep Crying lays bare this phenomenon through a jarring juxtaposition of the AI nurse’s soothing but empty verbal assurances and the visceral cries of the infant in its care. The work suggests that as AI systems become more fluent in appropriating human languages of emotion, we must become more discerning consumers of their affective contrivances and attuned to the realities of their emotional lack. What appears as empathy at first blush reveals itself, upon closer inspection, as mere emotional ventriloquism.

The above text was generated by Claude Plus, I wonder if it understands what 100 words are. Oh, I see. Understanding is hard for AI.