On Emotionally Intelligent AI (with Chris Gagne, Hume AI)

Chris Gagne manages AI research at Hume, which just released an expressive text-to-speech model in a super impressive demo. Chris and Daniel discuss AI and emotional understanding:

• How does “prosody” add a dimension to human communication? What is Hume hoping to gain by adding it to Human-AI communication?
• Do we want to interact with AI like we interact with humans? Or should the interaction models be different?
• Are we entering the Uncanny Valley phase of emotionally intelligent AI?
• Do LLMs actually have the ability to reason about emotions? Does it matter?
• What do we risk, by empowering AI with emotional understanding? Are there risks from deception and manipulation? Or even a loss of human agency?