Provoking Public Reflection on Robotics and AI through Cat Royale, an Artistic Installation

Current discussion on AI often presents binary for/against stances, making it difficult to foster nuanced discourse. But how can we as designers, developers, researchers, and artists communicate the nuances of our work to non-experts? Art can be a powerful medium for public engagement prompting reflection on complex topics. We examine audience engagement with Cat Royale, an artwork that invited audiences to reflect on AI, robotics, and the trust we place in them. We show that constructing and presenting an art installation as a deliberately ambiguous interface can provoke and encourage critical reflection, and we argue for the importance of making abstract technologies, such as AI, tangible and relatable through concrete examples, including artworks. Finally, we examine forms of ambiguity that arise at the intersection of AI and public engagement, and propose two new kinds relevant to the future of beyond-human interaction in HCI: moral ambiguity and ambiguity of species.