Presentation at the symposium Entanglements: Philosophy & Design

Fernando Secomandi ran a workshop titled “Who Does Your AI Companion Hide?” at the Entanglements symposium, organized by Samantha Copeland and Deger Ozkaramanli, at Lijm & Cultuur, Delft. The workshop invited participants to explore generative AI–based “companion” technologies — such as ChatGPT— and experiment with interrogating them about any real human “hidden behind.” The session was grounded in a conceptual background on technology-mediated mutual recognition, drawing on post-phenomenological and Hegelian philosophy and applied to human–computer interaction, prompting attendees to rethink AI companionship not as a neutral intermediary or agent-in-itself but as constitutive of human-artifact-human relations.