We increasingly form enduring and emotionally salient bonds with AI-powered technologies. Yet, arguably, most of the users don’t actually believe that these technologies harbour genuine affective (and more generally mental) states towards them. Why, then, do users bond with technologies? What mental states support and enable the flourishing of such human-AI bonds, leading some users to even fall in love with their AI companions? In his talk, Marco Facchin-Clerici begins by answering these questions criticising popular (in the philosophical circles) fictionalist accounts of human-AI interactions. In the light of these limitations, and trying to overcome them, he offers a different account, based on a-liefs. Roughly put, the human-looking surface of these technologies triggers our emotional responses, in a way that is entirely a-rational and unavoidable. 

Marco Facchin-Clerici is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. He is interested in how minds work and tries to investigate this in an empirically-informed manner. In particular, he focuses on: Mental/cognitive/neural representations, 4E cognition, especially extended cognition, predictive processing/the free energy principle, and cognitive ontology.