The UN-connected laboratory has created two AI-powered avatars designed to teach people about the issue of refugees.
404 Media wrote about experiments conducted by the UN Center for Policy Studies (UNU-CPR) class. This created two AI agents or avatars.
Users should be able to talk to Amina and Abdalla on the experiment’s website, but they received an error message when they tried to sign up on a Saturday afternoon.
Eduardo Albrecht, a Colombian professor and senior fellow at UNU-CPR, told 404 Media that he and his students were “playing just by messing around with the concept,” and that he hadn’t proposed this as a UN solution.
A paper summarizing this work suggests that these avatars will ultimately be used to “quickly assert to donors.” However, many of the workshop participants who interacted with agents also noted that they responded negatively, for example, by saying that refugees can “speak for themselves in real life.”
