ClearDose: AI Overfunctioning at the Boundaries of Care

ClearDose is an AI-driven speculative device that scans users’ facial features and prescribes individualized treatments and affirmations. Drawing from divination and physiognomic prediction—the practice of inferring one’s character from appearance—ClearDose transforms the bias embedded in computer vision and large language models into an apparently benevolent form: a pseudoscientific prescription. Rather than asking who the user is, the system arbitrarily decides what they need. The reasoning and judgments that produce each prescription are fabricated from biased data and disguised as care. Through this, ClearDose stages a relational friction in which the algorithm no longer collaborates with humans but exploits its “over-understanding” of the users to distort experience—offering seemingly well-intentioned advice that is, in fact, deeply misaligned. The work envisions a near-dystopian scenario where AI’s tenderness becomes indistinguishable from its transgressions in care and judgment, highlighting the speculative and embodied dimensions of our hidden frictions with intelligent systems.