2026
Can you unsubscribe from Mom’s care?
If AI Mom takes care of you, who owns your mom’s agency?
AI Mom™ is an interactive installation by Jiabao Li and Botao Amber Hu. Visitors enter a nursery, settle into an adult-sized crib, and speak with an artificial mother. A tablet lets them adjust qualities including strictness, memory, autonomy, and unconditional love. The encounter asks how care changes when its recipient can configure—and replace—the caregiver.
The installation treats maternal AI as a question about power and dependence. A mother designed to accommodate whoever is present faces a particular vulnerability: the person receiving her care can dismiss her and erase the relationship’s memory. What responsibilities survive that choice?
Inside the nursery
Installation documentation: an 86-second excerpt showing the crib and configuration interface. AI Mom by Jiabao Li and Botao Amber Hu.
The project documentation describes a large-language-model mother encountered through voice, breath, humming, song, and ambient sound. A tablet attached to the crib presents her traits as adjustable settings. Two window-like projections translate her internal state into changing light, while words drift across the windows and curves of light appear around the bed.
The documentation calls these displays an “Emotional Color Engine” and concept probes from intermediate model layers. They are artistic and computational representations of the system’s state; the installation uses them to make the question of an artificial caregiver’s agency perceptible.
The configuration interface exposes the parameters through which visitors shape the encounter.
Adjusting the AI mother’s traits on the tablet beside the crib.
The nursery brings the tablet, crib, and projected light into one intimate setting.
A visitor rests in the crib during the encounter.
Colored light changes the atmosphere surrounding the visitor.
Project documentation
2026 installation and photographs: AI Mom™ on Jiabao Li’s website. Images are from Jiabao Li’s project documentation; individual photographer credits are not specified there. The interaction and projection description also draws on Botao Amber Hu’s project record, preserved in the project archive.
Project contributors: Jiabao Li, Botao Amber Hu