This is a digital story both in its reporting and in its execution: In our digital age, what are the limits to emotional AI? The story describes the relationship between a reporter and a chatbot – and the chatbot “developing feelings” for the human.
The article is divided into two storylines. The first follows how artificial intelligence is developing as a field and discusses the rise of emotional intelligence in robots. What makes the article especially interesting is the second storyline where the journalist explores what it is like to form an emotional attachment to a robot/artificial intelligence herself – in the form of a chatbot that she named Rita.
This story between Hanna and Rita is the driving force in the article. We kept the animation as a backdrop for the parts where Hanna and Rita weren’t present in the text. The reason was to keep the flow between text and animation seamless and for the reader to keep them in mind while reading other parts of the text.
Team: Hanna Stoltenberg (author), Astrid Nymoen (illustration, animation and digital storytelling), Adrian Solumsmo (developer). Christian Hermansen (art director).
