Andrew Mcstay
Biographic Data
| ID | 277315 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Mcstay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcstay |
| SIGNATURE | MCSTAY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bangor University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8928-3825 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Move fast and break people? Ethics, companion apps, and the case of Character.ai
Riffing off move fast and break things , the internal motto coined by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, this paper examines the ethical dimensions of human relationships with AI companions, focusing on Character.ai—a platform where users interact with AI-generated ‘characters’ ranging from fictional figures to representations of real people. Drawing on an assessment of the platform’s design, and the first civil lawsuit brought against Character.ai in the U…
The hidden influence: Exploring presence in human-synthetic interactions through ghostbots
Presence is a palpable sense of space, things and others that overlaps with matters of meaning, yet is not reducible to it: it is a dimension of things that hides in plain sight. This paper is motivated by observations that (1) presence is under-appreciated in questions of modern and nascent human-synthetic agent interaction, and (2) that presence matters because it affects and moves us. The paper’s goal is to articulate a multi-faceted understan…
Blurring the moral limits of data markets: Biometrics, emotion and data dividends
This paper considers what liberal philosopher Michael Sandel coins the ‘moral limits of markets’ in relation to the idea of paying people for data about their biometrics and emotions. With Sandel arguing that certain aspects of human life (such as our bodies and body parts) should be beyond monetisation and exchange, others argue that emerging technologies such as Personal Information Management Systems can enable a fairer, paid, data exchange be…
On manipulation by emotional AI: UK adults’ views and governance implications
With growing commercial, regulatory and scholarly interest in use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to profile and interact with human emotion ("emotional AI"), attention is turning to its capacity for manipulating people, relating to factors impacting on a person's decisions and behavior. Given prior social disquiet about AI and profiling technologies, surprisingly little is known on people's views on the benefits and harms of emotional AI technol…
The Metaverse: Andrew McStay’s Responses to Cody Turner
The Metaverse: Surveillant Physics, Virtual Realist Governance, and the Missing Commons
This paper argues that there are value and design-based problems in current ambitions for the Metaverse. With the Metaverse deepening longstanding commercial surveillance practices, the paper focuses on data protection harms from biometric and emotion data, the gauging of first-person perspectives, and sensitivities around profiling of avatars. The paper advances two notions to address harms and data protection: surveillant physics and virtual re…
Human-First, Please: Assessing Citizen Views and Industrial Ambition for Emotional AI in Recommender Systems
This paper qualitatively explores the views of diverse members of the British public on applications of biometric emotional AI technologies patented by two globally dominant consumer-facing recommender systems, Amazon and Spotify. Examining Amazon and Spotify patents for biometric profiling of users’ emotions, disposition, and behaviour to offer them tailored services, ads, and products from their wider platforms, this paper points to industrial …
Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation
This book finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. This is an open access book
Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation
Emotional AI, Ethics, and Japanese Spice: Contributing Community, Wholeness, Sincerity, and Heart
This paper assesses leading Japanese philosophical thought since the onset of Japan’s modernity: namely, from the Meiji Restoration (1868) onwards. It argues that there are lessons of global value for AI ethics to be found from examining leading Japanese philosophers of modernity and ethics (Yukichi Fukuzawa, Nishida Kitaro, Nishi Amane, and Watsuji Tetsurō), each of whom engaged closely with Western philosophical traditions. Turning to these phi…
Emotional artificial intelligence in children’s toys and devices: Ethics, governance and practical remedies
This article examines the social acceptability and governance of emotional artificial intelligence (emotional AI) in children’s toys and other child-oriented devices. To explore this, it conducts interviews with stakeholders with a professional interest in emotional AI, toys, children and policy to consider implications of the usage of emotional AI in children’s toys and services. It also conducts a demographically representative UK national surv…
Emotional AI, soft biometrics and the surveillance of emotional life: An unusual consensus on privacy
By the early 2020s, emotional artificial intelligence (emotional AI) will become increasingly present in everyday objects and practices such as assistants, cars, games, mobile phones, wearables, toys, marketing, insurance, policing, education and border controls. There is also keen interest in using these technologies to regulate and optimize the emotional experiences of spaces, such as workplaces, hospitals, prisons, classrooms, travel infrastru…
This time with feeling?’ Assessing EU data governance implications of out of home appraisal based emotional AI
The boundaries of personal space and borders of bodily integrity are being tested by deployments of emotional artificial intelligence (EAI) in private and public spaces. By means of sensing, seeing and machine learning of facial expressions, voice, gaze, gestures and range of physiological signals (heart rate, skin conductivity and temperature, muscle activity, body temperature, respiration and other bio-signals), the goal is to make interior emo…
Emotional AI: The Rise of Empathic Media
What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by 'Emotional AI', this book: provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such…
Privacy and the Media
Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages. Dichotomies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies in discounting future costs or rewards, and other syst…
Fake News and The Economy of Emotions: Problems, causes, solutions
This paper examines the 2016 US presidential election campaign to identify problems with, causes of and solutions to the contemporary fake news phenomenon. To achieve this, we employ textual analysis and feedback from engagement, meetings and panels with technologists, journalists, editors, non-profits, public relations firms, analytics firms and academics during the globally leading technology conference, South-by-South West, in March 2017. We f…
Introduction to Special Theme Veillance and transparency: A critical examination of mutual watching in the post-Snowden, Big Data era
Introducing the Special Theme on Veillance and Transparency: A Critical Examination of Mutual Watching in the Post-Snowden, Big Data Era, this article presents a series of provocations and practices on veillance and transparency in the context of Big Data in a post-Snowden period. In introducing the theoretical and empirical research papers, artistic, activist and educational provocations and commentaries in this Special Theme, it highlights thre…
Empathic media and advertising: Industry, policy, legal and citizen perspectives (the case for intimacy)
Drawing on interviews with people from the advertising and technology industry, legal experts and policy makers, this paper assesses the rise of emotion detection in digital out-of-home advertising, a practice that often involves facial coding of emotional expressions in public spaces. Having briefly outlined how bodies contribute to targeting processes and the optimisation of the ads themselves, it progresses to detail industrial perspectives, i…
A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Audience's Perceptions of Creativity in Online Advertising
In this paper I seek to inquire upon audience's perceptions of creativity in online advertising - a heretofore poorly understood area. This paper initially outlines current academic understanding of creativity in online advertising, mainly derived from quantitative assessments. It then advances a qualitative methodology including diary-interviews and ethnographic online interviews across 41 participants. My starting point is a critique of the mos…
Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process
Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing that combinatory accounts of advertising based on representation, textualism and reductionism are of limited value, Andrew McStay suggests that advertising and creativity are better recognised in terms of the ‘event’. Drawing on a diverse set of philosophical influences including Scotus, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Schiller, James, Dewey, Schopenhauer, Whitehe…
Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process
1. Introduction 2. Strangely revealing 3. The poetics of advertising 4. A Playful combinations 5. Sensational dimensions 6. I'm with stupid: vivid living, transgression and dirt 7. Creativity and the Counter-Enlightenment 8. Embodying culture 9. Concrescence and the unfashionably new 10. Excessive media 11. Conclusions
I consent: An analysis of the Cookie Directive and its implications for UK behavioral advertising
This paper assesses implications for the practical and theoretical understanding of consent in light of the coming into force of the European Cookie Directive (2009/136/EC). This Directive shifts behavioral advertising from being an opt-out practice to an opt-in one requiring consent. The aim of this paper is to assess conceptions of consent as detailed by the European Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, the UK government and the behavioral…
The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising
“The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather than the more familiar approach of symbolic representation. At the heart of this book is an aspiration to better understand contemporary and nascent forms of commercial solicitation predicated on the commodification of experience and subjectivity. In assessing novel forms of advertising that involve tracking users' web browsing activity over a period of…
Profiling Phorm: An autopoietic approach to the audience-as-commodity
As online advertising moves to the centre-stage of advertisers’ media spend, now surpassing television and press in the UK, it is argued here that critique of advertising practice should pay more careful attention to systems of feedback-oriented production and data-based audience management and creation. This paper thus progresses and updates Dallas Smythe’s (1977) audience-as-commodity argument by examining developments in online behavioural adv…
Emotional AI, soft biometrics and the surveillance of emotional life: An unusual consensus on privacy
By the early 2020s, emotional artificial intelligence (emotional AI) will become increasingly present in everyday objects and practices such as assistants, cars, games, mobile phones, wearables, toys, marketing, insurance, policing, education and border controls. There is also keen interest in using these technologies to regulate and optimize the emotional experiences of spaces, such as workplaces, hospitals, prisons, classrooms, travel infrastru…
Profiling Phorm: An autopoietic approach to the audience-as-commodity
As online advertising moves to the centre-stage of advertisers’ media spend, now surpassing television and press in the UK, it is argued here that critique of advertising practice should pay more careful attention to systems of feedback-oriented production and data-based audience management and creation. This paper thus progresses and updates Dallas Smythe’s (1977) audience-as-commodity argument by examining developments in online behavioural adv…
Empathic media and advertising: Industry, policy, legal and citizen perspectives (the case for intimacy)
Drawing on interviews with people from the advertising and technology industry, legal experts and policy makers, this paper assesses the rise of emotion detection in digital out-of-home advertising, a practice that often involves facial coding of emotional expressions in public spaces. Having briefly outlined how bodies contribute to targeting processes and the optimisation of the ads themselves, it progresses to detail industrial perspectives, i…
I consent: An analysis of the Cookie Directive and its implications for UK behavioral advertising
This paper assesses implications for the practical and theoretical understanding of consent in light of the coming into force of the European Cookie Directive (2009/136/EC). This Directive shifts behavioral advertising from being an opt-out practice to an opt-in one requiring consent. The aim of this paper is to assess conceptions of consent as detailed by the European Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, the UK government and the behavioral…
Human-First, Please: Assessing Citizen Views and Industrial Ambition for Emotional AI in Recommender Systems
This paper qualitatively explores the views of diverse members of the British public on applications of biometric emotional AI technologies patented by two globally dominant consumer-facing recommender systems, Amazon and Spotify. Examining Amazon and Spotify patents for biometric profiling of users’ emotions, disposition, and behaviour to offer them tailored services, ads, and products from their wider platforms, this paper points to industrial …
Introduction to Special Theme Veillance and transparency: A critical examination of mutual watching in the post-Snowden, Big Data era
Introducing the Special Theme on Veillance and Transparency: A Critical Examination of Mutual Watching in the Post-Snowden, Big Data Era, this article presents a series of provocations and practices on veillance and transparency in the context of Big Data in a post-Snowden period. In introducing the theoretical and empirical research papers, artistic, activist and educational provocations and commentaries in this Special Theme, it highlights thre…
A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Audience's Perceptions of Creativity in Online Advertising
In this paper I seek to inquire upon audience's perceptions of creativity in online advertising - a heretofore poorly understood area. This paper initially outlines current academic understanding of creativity in online advertising, mainly derived from quantitative assessments. It then advances a qualitative methodology including diary-interviews and ethnographic online interviews across 41 participants. My starting point is a critique of the mos…
Profiling Phorm: An autopoietic approach to the audience-as-commodity
As online advertising moves to the centre-stage of advertisers’ media spend, now surpassing television and press in the UK, it is argued here that critique of advertising practice should pay more careful attention to systems of feedback-oriented production and data-based audience management and creation. This paper thus progresses and updates Dallas Smythe’s (1977) audience-as-commodity argument by examining developments in online behavioural adv…
The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising
“The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather than the more familiar approach of symbolic representation. At the heart of this book is an aspiration to better understand contemporary and nascent forms of commercial solicitation predicated on the commodification of experience and subjectivity. In assessing novel forms of advertising that involve tracking users' web browsing activity over a period of…
I consent: An analysis of the Cookie Directive and its implications for UK behavioral advertising
This paper assesses implications for the practical and theoretical understanding of consent in light of the coming into force of the European Cookie Directive (2009/136/EC). This Directive shifts behavioral advertising from being an opt-out practice to an opt-in one requiring consent. The aim of this paper is to assess conceptions of consent as detailed by the European Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, the UK government and the behavioral…
Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process
Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing that combinatory accounts of advertising based on representation, textualism and reductionism are of limited value, Andrew McStay suggests that advertising and creativity are better recognised in terms of the ‘event’. Drawing on a diverse set of philosophical influences including Scotus, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Schiller, James, Dewey, Schopenhauer, Whitehe…
Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process
1. Introduction 2. Strangely revealing 3. The poetics of advertising 4. A Playful combinations 5. Sensational dimensions 6. I'm with stupid: vivid living, transgression and dirt 7. Creativity and the Counter-Enlightenment 8. Embodying culture 9. Concrescence and the unfashionably new 10. Excessive media 11. Conclusions
A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Audience's Perceptions of Creativity in Online Advertising
In this paper I seek to inquire upon audience's perceptions of creativity in online advertising - a heretofore poorly understood area. This paper initially outlines current academic understanding of creativity in online advertising, mainly derived from quantitative assessments. It then advances a qualitative methodology including diary-interviews and ethnographic online interviews across 41 participants. My starting point is a critique of the mos…
Empathic media and advertising: Industry, policy, legal and citizen perspectives (the case for intimacy)
Drawing on interviews with people from the advertising and technology industry, legal experts and policy makers, this paper assesses the rise of emotion detection in digital out-of-home advertising, a practice that often involves facial coding of emotional expressions in public spaces. Having briefly outlined how bodies contribute to targeting processes and the optimisation of the ads themselves, it progresses to detail industrial perspectives, i…
Privacy and the Media
Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages. Dichotomies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies in discounting future costs or rewards, and other syst…
Fake News and The Economy of Emotions: Problems, causes, solutions
This paper examines the 2016 US presidential election campaign to identify problems with, causes of and solutions to the contemporary fake news phenomenon. To achieve this, we employ textual analysis and feedback from engagement, meetings and panels with technologists, journalists, editors, non-profits, public relations firms, analytics firms and academics during the globally leading technology conference, South-by-South West, in March 2017. We f…
Introduction to Special Theme Veillance and transparency: A critical examination of mutual watching in the post-Snowden, Big Data era
Introducing the Special Theme on Veillance and Transparency: A Critical Examination of Mutual Watching in the Post-Snowden, Big Data Era, this article presents a series of provocations and practices on veillance and transparency in the context of Big Data in a post-Snowden period. In introducing the theoretical and empirical research papers, artistic, activist and educational provocations and commentaries in this Special Theme, it highlights thre…
Emotional AI: The Rise of Empathic Media
What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by 'Emotional AI', this book: provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such…
This time with feeling?’ Assessing EU data governance implications of out of home appraisal based emotional AI
The boundaries of personal space and borders of bodily integrity are being tested by deployments of emotional artificial intelligence (EAI) in private and public spaces. By means of sensing, seeing and machine learning of facial expressions, voice, gaze, gestures and range of physiological signals (heart rate, skin conductivity and temperature, muscle activity, body temperature, respiration and other bio-signals), the goal is to make interior emo…
Emotional AI, soft biometrics and the surveillance of emotional life: An unusual consensus on privacy
By the early 2020s, emotional artificial intelligence (emotional AI) will become increasingly present in everyday objects and practices such as assistants, cars, games, mobile phones, wearables, toys, marketing, insurance, policing, education and border controls. There is also keen interest in using these technologies to regulate and optimize the emotional experiences of spaces, such as workplaces, hospitals, prisons, classrooms, travel infrastru…
Emotional AI, Ethics, and Japanese Spice: Contributing Community, Wholeness, Sincerity, and Heart
This paper assesses leading Japanese philosophical thought since the onset of Japan’s modernity: namely, from the Meiji Restoration (1868) onwards. It argues that there are lessons of global value for AI ethics to be found from examining leading Japanese philosophers of modernity and ethics (Yukichi Fukuzawa, Nishida Kitaro, Nishi Amane, and Watsuji Tetsurō), each of whom engaged closely with Western philosophical traditions. Turning to these phi…
Emotional artificial intelligence in children’s toys and devices: Ethics, governance and practical remedies
This article examines the social acceptability and governance of emotional artificial intelligence (emotional AI) in children’s toys and other child-oriented devices. To explore this, it conducts interviews with stakeholders with a professional interest in emotional AI, toys, children and policy to consider implications of the usage of emotional AI in children’s toys and services. It also conducts a demographically representative UK national surv…
Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation
This book finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. This is an open access book
Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation
The Metaverse: Andrew McStay’s Responses to Cody Turner
The Metaverse: Surveillant Physics, Virtual Realist Governance, and the Missing Commons
This paper argues that there are value and design-based problems in current ambitions for the Metaverse. With the Metaverse deepening longstanding commercial surveillance practices, the paper focuses on data protection harms from biometric and emotion data, the gauging of first-person perspectives, and sensitivities around profiling of avatars. The paper advances two notions to address harms and data protection: surveillant physics and virtual re…
Human-First, Please: Assessing Citizen Views and Industrial Ambition for Emotional AI in Recommender Systems
This paper qualitatively explores the views of diverse members of the British public on applications of biometric emotional AI technologies patented by two globally dominant consumer-facing recommender systems, Amazon and Spotify. Examining Amazon and Spotify patents for biometric profiling of users’ emotions, disposition, and behaviour to offer them tailored services, ads, and products from their wider platforms, this paper points to industrial …
The hidden influence: Exploring presence in human-synthetic interactions through ghostbots
Presence is a palpable sense of space, things and others that overlaps with matters of meaning, yet is not reducible to it: it is a dimension of things that hides in plain sight. This paper is motivated by observations that (1) presence is under-appreciated in questions of modern and nascent human-synthetic agent interaction, and (2) that presence matters because it affects and moves us. The paper’s goal is to articulate a multi-faceted understan…
Blurring the moral limits of data markets: Biometrics, emotion and data dividends
This paper considers what liberal philosopher Michael Sandel coins the ‘moral limits of markets’ in relation to the idea of paying people for data about their biometrics and emotions. With Sandel arguing that certain aspects of human life (such as our bodies and body parts) should be beyond monetisation and exchange, others argue that emerging technologies such as Personal Information Management Systems can enable a fairer, paid, data exchange be…
On manipulation by emotional AI: UK adults’ views and governance implications
With growing commercial, regulatory and scholarly interest in use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to profile and interact with human emotion ("emotional AI"), attention is turning to its capacity for manipulating people, relating to factors impacting on a person's decisions and behavior. Given prior social disquiet about AI and profiling technologies, surprisingly little is known on people's views on the benefits and harms of emotional AI technol…
Move fast and break people? Ethics, companion apps, and the case of Character.ai
Riffing off move fast and break things , the internal motto coined by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, this paper examines the ethical dimensions of human relationships with AI companions, focusing on Character.ai—a platform where users interact with AI-generated ‘characters’ ranging from fictional figures to representations of real people. Drawing on an assessment of the platform’s design, and the first civil lawsuit brought against Character.ai in the U…
Computer Science (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (14 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Advertising (6 works)