Narrative Practices and AI in Care Contexts. On the Impossible Automatism of Meaning.

Hermeneutics and ethics have long recognized the narrative dimension and its practices as having an irreplaceable capacity to give meaning to human experience. Because of the “sense-making” value of narratives, this construct has been used in caring practices as a means of self-disclosure, as a tool to strengthen the caring relationship, as a provisional response to the experience of loss of meaning. This happens in contexts where care is manifested as a relational taking on of vulnerabilities of different origins. Stories are given a prominent role in care contexts since there is a need to repair, to stitch together experiences of disintegration. On the other hand, the current debate on the application of artificial intelligence in care contexts is constantly growing. There are arguments about assisted decision-making, self-care practices facilitated by the use of AI, including through “artificial” storytelling, there is a debate about social robots that aim to facilitate, if not replace, human care in its most automatic and repetitive gestures, and finally there is a discussion about AI as a support for narrative practices precisely in care contexts. In this paper, I aim to briefly illustrate the relationship between narrative and the search for meaning as the ethical-anthropological foundation of any discourse on the applications of narrative in care; address some of the “curative” virtues of narrative in order to verify whether these virtues are diminished or enhanced by recourse to AI; trace some limitations of these applications starting from the differences between human narrative and machine storytelling. I argue that some limitations depend on the automatism of giving meaning in the face of the experience of losing that meaning. Therefore, I propose to show how human narrative and its characteristics constitute a valid criterion for recognizing as acceptable some applications of AI in care contexts.