In partnership with Rhizome, poster by Jae Yeon Kim and video edited by @mathys_ideas

How can human-AI interaction support, rather than detract from, human relationships and creativity?

This hour-long conversation took place on January 19th, 2025 at Gray Area, Sf. It was presented by Rhizome and APOSSIBLE to bring together Eugenia Kuyda, CEO and founder of Replika, and Misha Sra, Professor and Director of the Human-AI Integration Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Hosted by Michael Connor, Executive Director of Rhizome, the conversation builds our partnership with the digital art organization Rhizome. Previously we partnered with Rhizome for an AI-focused edition of the long-running art-tech collaboration platform 7x7, which was held in January 2024, with Kuyda among the participants.

About the Speakers

Eugenia Kuyda

Eugenia Kuyda is the CEO and founder of Replika, an AI companion designed to build deep emotional connection and help people feel better, and has been at the vanguard of AI for the whole of her career. Eugenia started working on conversational AI in 2012 - and launched the first publicly available chatbot fully powered by generative AI in 2015. Prior to that she was an investigative reporter and journalist. Replika is backed by Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures and has been recognized as one of the “Five Technologies that will Rock Your World” by New York Times AI tech reporter Cade Metz.

Misha Sra

Misha Sra is the John and Eileen Gerngross Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she directs the Human-AI Integration Lab in the Computer Science department. Misha received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 2018, advised by Prof. Pattie Maes in the Fluid Interfaces Group. She has published at the most selective HCI, VR, and machine learning venues such as CHI, UIST, IEEE VR, CVPR, ECCV and EMNLP where she received four best paper awards and honorable mentions. MIT selected her as an EECS Rising Star in 2018. In 2023, she was awarded an NSF CAREER Award for her work in Human-AI Interaction design. Her research has received extensive coverage from leading media outlets (e.g., from MIT News, The Verge, PCMag) and has drawn the attention of industry research, such as Toyota Research, Samsung Research, and Unity 3D.

Michael Connor

Michael Connor is Executive Director of Rhizome, where he oversaw the Net Art Anthology initiative, an effort to retell the history of net art through 100 works, presented as an online exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book. He is also curatorial advisor for Kadist, a non-profit contemporary art organization, and ArtBlocks, an NFT platform. His first online curatorial project took place in 2003 at FACT, Liverpool, where he organized an edition of the traveling exhibition “Kingdom of Piracy” with Shu Lea Cheang, Yukiko Shikata, and Armin Medosch. Connor is currently editing a book by Gene Youngblood about the work of Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz.