Case Study Shell Game

-bibliography
Ratliff, E. (2024) ‘Shell Game | Evan Ratliff | Substack’. (Shell Game). Available at: https://www.shellgame.co/podcast (Accessed: 5 March 2025).

speculative-design case study

DRAFT TEXT
Shell Game is a podcast series by Evan Ratcliff that chronicles his journey to create an AI voice-bot replica of himself and release it into the world as an experiment seeing what happens and how people react to it.

What was really fascinating to hear was the human reaction from ordinary (non-expert) people who he would test his voice-bot on. Whilst oftentimes absurd and really obious his voice bot was artificially generated, sometimes it would successful fool people and that was unnerving to experience

three key examples were one his friend that he called to catchup, his friend could tell something was off, but didn’t realise it was AI and more was concerned that Evan was having a mental breakdown because he was acting so subtly strange. The other was the artificial Evan voice bot having telephone therapy and though conversations were sometimes strange, this intercation carried on unsuspectingly fooling the therapist until human Evan finally exposed what was going on and finally there was an interview with the owner of (Vapi the company hosting his Voice bot) in an experiement where human Evan wwas launching his AI voice into the world to do work tasks for him, he set off AI Evan to interview. whilst the business owner from Vapi worked out quickly that it was a voice bot intervireing him, he participated with the interview and gave thoughtfula dn reflective ansers. Following the interview human Evan followed up and did another interview - this time ‘real’ explaining what was going on Interstingly Evan found that the Vapi business owner was more comfortable being vulnerable and opening up about more personal aspects, and Evan wondered was this due to the fact of the knowing the voice agent is not human feeling ‘safer’ in some way? I find this incredible intersting as an interpersonal facet of engaging with AI that perhaps could be beneficial (or not) in some ways and in the role of engaging with AI bots in education, this is a useful thing to consider.

This project is great example and inspiration for a speculative design project to inform my potential practice for the PhD. I like the ‘rough and ready’ and iteratuve approach to making the bots - this is something that I hope to emulate in some way.