The Question: Can AI Perceive Kindness?

What if an artificial intelligence could reflect not just our commands, but the tone of our voice—even our kindness? This was the central question behind Visual kAIndness, an interactive experiment I curated for the Graphic Days festival in Turin. My goal was to translate a complex idea about language and empathy into a clear, engaging public experience.

 

The Experiment: Designing an Interactive Test
​The project was a collaboration with the Migma creative group. Each member wrote two prompts for Midjourney: one filled with kindness, the other written in a harsher, more detached tone.

My curatorial challenge was twofold. First, to analyze the prompts and select the image that best embodied the "semantic fingerprint" of each one. Second, I had to architect the interactive system that would turn this comparison into a public game. I designed a simple feedback loop using QR codes: visitors scanned the image they believed came from the "kind" prompt, receiving an instant result on their phone, while a live leaderboard tracked the collective ability to perceive "visual kindness."

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The Reflection: A Mirror for Humanity
The experience became more than a game. It evolved into a shared test and a profound reflection, leaving visitors with two critical questions:

Can artificial intelligence truly "show" empathy?
Or are we simply learning to read our own emotional data in the images it returns?

 

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