Artificial Intelligence, Humanness, and Nonverbal Sociality

Anthropologists have yet to fully consider how artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies may be put to work to develop novel ethnographic media that transcend the basic limitations of the traditional ethnographic text. This article describes an experiment in the development of an AI system based on ethnographic fieldwork focusing on a specific form of nonverbal interaction and human practitioners’ evaluations of the system's ‘humanness’. Among many other elements of humanness, this discussion highlights the many ways that human subjects locate humanness in an agent's ability to parse and respond to others in the midst of nonverbal social interaction.