Andrew McStay

Andrew McStay

Professor of Technology and Society

Emotional AI Lab

Bangor University

Professional Summary

Professor of Technology and Society at Bangor University, Director of the Emotional AI Lab, and Chair of IEEE 7014.1-2026 — the world’s first international standard on emulated empathy in AI. My research examines emotional and empathic AI, AI governance, and the risks of AI-enabled manipulation and scams. I also work with organisations as an independent consultant and via Duco Experts, with clients including leading AI labs, the US Government, and Fortune 500 companies.

Interests

Emotional and empathic AI AI governance and ethics AI-enabled scams and manipulation Human–technology relationships
Featured Publications
Soft law for unintentional empathy: addressing the governance gap in emotion-recognition AI technologies featured image

Soft law for unintentional empathy: addressing the governance gap in emotion-recognition AI technologies

Despite regulatory efforts, there is a significant governance gap in managing emotion recognition AI technologies and those that emulate empathy. This paper asks: should …

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Andrew McStay
Move fast and break people? Ethics, companion apps, and the case of Character.ai featured image

Move fast and break people? Ethics, companion apps, and the case of Character.ai

Riffing off move fast and break things — the internal motto coined by Meta's Mark Zuckerberg — this paper examines the ethical dimensions of human relationships with AI companions, …

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Andrew McStay
The hidden influence: exploring presence in human-synthetic interactions through ghostbots featured image

The hidden influence: exploring presence in human-synthetic interactions through ghostbots

Presence is a palpable sense of space, things and others that overlaps with matters of meaning, yet is not reducible to it: it is a dimension of things that hides in plain sight. …

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Andrew McStay
Automating Empathy: Decoding Technologies that Gauge Intimate Life featured image

Automating Empathy: Decoding Technologies that Gauge Intimate Life

Automating Empathy assesses technologies used to gauge how people are feeling. The book begins by historically situating the belief that by reading the body and its expressions one …

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Andrew McStay