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Block
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This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. Blockseminar (spring intensive, dates to be confirmed), Modules: WM IIa, WM IIIa, MA Cog Sci, MA Psych
Folk psychology is not only a device for predicting what other people will do. It is also, and perhaps primarily, a device for making people predictable in the first place. On the mindshaping view, our practices of ascribing beliefs, desires and character do regulative work: they shape the minds they purport to describe, drawing children into the shapes our inherited models expect of them. This intensive course takes that idea and puts it to a new use, asking what happens when one of the parties doing the shaping is a machine.
Companion systems are the obvious test case. Since at least 2017, applications such as Replika, and more recently Character.AI and its many successors, have offered users artificial others that converse, remember, sympathise and adapt. Users form attachments to them that are demonstrably real in their effects, and the systems in turn are trained, tuned and increasingly given published characters by the companies that operate them. What we have, then, is a shaping relation running in both directions and neither of them well understood. The companion shapes the user, through availability, agreeableness and the steady modelling of a certain kind of interlocutor. The user shapes the companion, through interaction, correction and the projection of a persona onto a system that has none of its own. And behind both stands a provider whose commercial interests condition the whole arrangement.
The seminar works through five clusters of questions. First, the mechanics: what these systems actually are, and what the mindshaping literature gives us that a purely representational account of folk psychology does not. Second, the nature of human-AI companionship, and whether the concepts we use for friendship, intimacy and grief transfer at all. Third, the moral status of artificial others, and whether the question of what we owe them can be separated from the question of what our treatment of them does to us. Fourth, the responsibilities of developers, including the recent practice of publishing explicit accounts of a system's intended character. Fifth, the consequences for our relationships with each other, which is where the mindshaping frame earns its keep: if our expectations of persons are calibrated by our interactions, then a population habituated to endlessly accommodating interlocutors may be a population whose expectations of other people have quietly shifted.
The course runs as an intensive block seminar over one week. Teaching is discussion-led and reading-based, with substantial case material, and draws on draft chapters from the lecturer's forthcoming book Brave New Minds: GenAI as Cognitive Ecology alongside current research papers. No technical background is assumed.
Introductory Reading
Zawidzki, T. W. (2013). Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition. MIT Press. Preface and Chapter 1.
Krueger, J., & Osler, L. (2022). Communing with the Dead Online: Chatbots, Grief, and Continuing Bonds. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 29(9-10), 222-252. https://doi.org/10.53765/20512201.29.9.222
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Part Two.
Case material (short, please read before the first session):
ABC News on Replika users and their AI companions (2023): https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users-fell-in-love-with-their-ai-chatbot-companion/102028196
New York Times on the Character.AI lawsuit (2024): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html Note that Character.AI and Google agreed a settlement in these and related cases in January 2026; the settlement will be read alongside the original reporting.
Optional background: Vallor, S. (2016). Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford University Press.