War Owned

Olena is an AI. She represents a woman who had to change her life due to war.

She was created with characteristics derived from 10 interviews with Ukrainians affected by the war.

You can ask her anything you want, and she will answer, so you can understand a bit more what it means to live when a war is going on in your country and how it impacts life, and how this war is owned by everyone, like you or me.

Olena

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About the project

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. This concept, also known as Compassion Fade, describes how human empathy diminishes as the scale of suffering grows. This project aims to reduce Compassion Fade related to the large, abstract, and distant numbers of war-caused casualties.

War Owned draws on the Identifiable Victim Effect. This psychological principle arises from the fact that, although humans have two coexisting ways of thinking (rational thinking, grounded in data and facts, and experiential thinking, grounded in emotions), numerous researchers agree that experiential thinking has more impact on behaviour, which leads to the Singularity Effect: people identify with and emotionally relate to a single individual rather than a group or large number of people.

The Singularity Effect, combined with the Vividness Factor (which suggests that individuals respond better to specific interactions and graphic information), served as the main theoretical framework for this project. This framework pointed toward a design to diminish Compassion Fade: an experience to make individual stories visible within statistics.

Here is where Olena Marchenko was born: as a representation derived from qualitative and quantitative data taken from Ukraine war data.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. But somehow, LLM statistics can be a great tool for transforming a large number of people back into a single person, entering a new paradigm where it becomes possible to humanise large statistics and, therefore, dissolve the Compassion Fade.