Psychopathology, Narrative, and Cognitive Architecture (or: Why AI Characters Should Be Just as Screwed-up as We Are)

Historically, AI research has understandably focused on those aspects of cognition that distinguish humans from other animals – in particular, our capacity for complex problem solving. However, with a few notable exceptions, narratives in popular media generally focus on those aspects of human experience that we share with other social animals: attachment, mating and child rearing, violence, group affiliation, and inter-group and inter-individual conflict. Moreover, the stories we tell often focus on the ways in which these processes break down. In this paper, I will argue that current agent architectures don’t offer particularly good models of these phenomena, and discuss specific phenomena that I think it would be illuminating to understand at a computational level.