Title: Old Weave, New Loom: Interlacing the Social and Instrumental in Human-AI Relations
Time: 3-4 p.m.
Date: August 26, 2026
Location: Computing and Information Science Building, Room 350
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Abstract: Human-AI relations are commonly characterized categorically—usually as tool-relations or social-relations. Drawing from evidence of AI companionship, construals of machine minds, and how humans judge AI behaviors, this talk argues that binary classification is at best incomplete. Instead, these relations manifest a socioinstrumental weave of affect and tasks, confiding and constructing, autotelics and outputs. Current work hints that the social and instrumental facets of human-AI relationality function as warp and weft, to inform and even scaffold one another. I will present findings, pose open questions, and offer provocations for whether and how current scholarly frameworks are adequate for this emerging characterization.
Bio: Jaime Banks (Ph.D., Colorado State University) is the Katchmar-Wilhelm Endowed Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and PI of the iSchool’s LinkLab. Her research is animated by questions of human-technology relations, especially those with AI, social robots, and videogame avatars. She focuses on construals of mind and morality, and their impacts on trust and companionship. Her work is funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.