Over the course of the participatory research project “How to explain AI”, the LIT Robopsychology Lab cooperated with citizen scientists, AI experts and artists to explore creative approaches towards communicating information about AI to the general public. This workflow resulted in a collaboration with the singer-songwriter “Blonder Engel” and the development of the song “A song all about AI”.

In a scientific experiment with two measurement points, the AI song and the podcast were compared. The experiment consisted of two conditions, which participants were randomly assigned to. One group listened to the song, while the other group experienced the AI-podcast. Notably, both song and podcast had identical content and duration. The respective audio file was played twice – first without and then with subtitles to enhance text comprehension. Subsequently, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire to assess their self-reported AI literacy, as well as their perceptions of the entertainment and informational value of each presentation medium. Over-time effects were measured two weeks after the start of the experiment through a second questionnaire.

Phase 1: 97 participants, conducted between August 29th and September 1st, 2023, at the Kepler Salon and Ars Electronica Center (AEC) and from September 5th to September 7th, 2023, at the LIT Open Innovation Center (OIC) at JKU Campus

Phase 2: 81 participants (all of them had participated in phase 1), conducted from September 12th to September 15th, 2023, at the Kepler Salon and AEC as well as from September 18th to September 20th, 2023, at the OIC