Vibing with your AI
This talk examines how people understand and relate to conversational AI, tracing a shift from metaphor-based mental models to deliberately designed AI personalities. Drawing on years of research published across ACM CHI, CSCW, TOCHI, and CUI, it shows how users’ perceptions of voice and conversational interfaces have evolved from tools or simplistic agents to social actors with distinct “vibes.” I demonstrate how early metaphors, such as AI as a child, butler, or friend, laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s personality-driven design enabled by large language models, where traits such as agreeableness or openness can be systematically tuned. The talk concludes by surfacing both the design opportunities and ethical risks of this shift, including trust calibration, emotional manipulation, and transparency, and argues for more responsible, human-centered approaches to AI personality design.

About our speaker
Smit Desai is an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD) at Northeastern University, with joint appointments in Art + Design and Communication Studies and an affiliated appointment in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He directs the Conversational Human–AI Interactions (CHAI) Lab, which investigates how people understand, trust, and collaborate with conversational AI—and how these systems can be designed to augment human capabilities and support meaningful interactions.

Smit’s research bridges theory and design practice: he examines users’ mental models through methods such as metaphor analysis and persona design, and applies these insights to build next-generation conversational agents. His current projects span healthcare (AI assistants for serious illness conversations in emergency departments), aging and well-being (voice-first reminiscence systems like Memory Box), and everyday collaboration (LLM-powered chatbots that adapt to user personality). Across these efforts, his work emphasizes human-centered AI principles, transparency, and the social consequences of giving machines personalities and roles.

His work has appeared in premier HCI venues including CHI, CSCW, and TOCHI. He serves on the organizing committee for the ACM SIGCHI Conversational User Interfaces Conference (2024-2026), ACM CHI (2026), and leads workshops on ethical conversational persona design at major HCI conferences. Smit received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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