Abstract:
Recent years have seen a gold rush towards replacing people with AI agents in communication: they can serve as your therapist, your tutor, your financial advisor, your interviewer. In this talk I will propose a contrasting vision: one where AI is used for supporting humans in their communication while preserving their agency.
Achieving this vision requires moving beyond the current transactional paradigm embodied by current generative AI systems, which are designed to fulfill the immediate goals of a single person, such as answering a question, solving a math problem, booking a flight, or (repeatedly) replying in character. To meaningfully support human-human communication without disrupting or supplanting it, an AI system must instead follow a proactive paradigm: it needs to decide when to intervene to offer support as the interaction unfolds, rather than wait to explicitly be prompted as AI agents and chatbots do today. In this talk I will present initial progress on AI technologies that enable such a proactive mode of operation, and demonstrate communication support tools that embody it.
Data and code are available through ConvoKit: https://convokit.cornell.edu
This talk includes joint work with Jonathan P. Chang, Lillian Lee, Karen Levy, Charlotte Schluger, and Vivian Nguyen.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is an associate professor in the information science department at Cornell University. His research aims at developing computational methods that can lead to a better understanding of our conversational practices, supporting tools that can improve the way we communicate with each other. He is the recipient of several awards—including an NSF CAREER Award, the ICWSM 2025 test of time award, the WWW 2013 Best Paper Award, a CSCW 2017 Best Paper Award, and two Google Faculty Research Awards—and his work has been featured in popular media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, NBC's The Today Show, NPR and the New York Times.
