Ryan Kim
Founding Director & Principal Investigator, Ryan Research Institute
Research Professor, Kwangwoon University
Human–AI Governance · Interpretive Authority · Affective Sovereignty · AI Evaluation
Ryan Research Institute
Ryan Research Institute is a Paris-based independent research institute studying Human–AI Governance, interpretive authority, and the institutional consequences of computational inference about people.
Across its research programme, RRI asks a single question: when AI systems infer, classify, evaluate, or act on human states, who acquires authority from that inference—and who retains the right to contest, correct, refuse, or reinterpret it?
RRI develops Affective Sovereignty and Interpretive Authority as a connected research programme spanning human–AI interaction, AI evaluation, narrative–affect geometry, measurement validity, philosophy of mind, and institutional design.
Its work includes peer-reviewed research, open datasets and research resources, graduate teaching, books, public scholarship, and policy translation.
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Research record · November 2026 · 9 peer-reviewed journal articles, including Frontiers in Psychology, Communications AI & Computing, Acta Psychologica, PLOS ONE, Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Discover Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning with Applications, and Data in Brief. Open narrative–affect research resources derived from 351,734 relationship narratives. Research leadership at independent RRI, Paris; a separate Research Professor appointment at Kwangwoon University, Seoul.
Latest Research & Public Scholarship
4 November 2026 | Delegated Precision — Published
Frontiers in Psychology · Hypothesis and Theory
The ninth peer-reviewed journal article in RRI's current record examines when repeated external affective labelling might alter later self-interpretation. It proposes a predictive-processing account and testable experimental conditions; the hypothesised effect on human interoceptive inference is not presented as an established finding.
6 November 2026 | Seoul Metropolitan Council Policy Forum — Forthcoming
AI Emotion Interpretation and the Protection of Civic Rights · Seoul Metropolitan Council, First Grand Conference Room · 15:00–17:00 KST
Ryan Kim will deliver the keynote AI Interpretation of Emotion and the Transfer of Interpretive Authority (15:20–15:45) and lead academic policy discussion. The accompanying international overview includes eight written perspectives by nine contributors; four Korean experts are designated discussants. Written scholarship is distinct from attendance, institutional sponsorship, and adoption of a common policy statement. The policy proposal addresses a critical threshold: when computational inference enters an institution's decisions, accuracy alone does not justify its authority.
Research programme · Research publications
October 2026 | Graduate Teaching — Completed
Five sessions on Human–AI Governance were delivered at Kwangwoon University between 15 September and 13 October 2026, connecting interpretive authority, evidence quality, and responsible institutional use of AI.
2 November 2026 | Public Policy Essay — Published
How Far Should the State Know a Citizen's Mind? · 보건의료신문
A Korean-language policy essay examines the limits of state inference about emotional and mental life, ahead of the Seoul Metropolitan Council forum. It is an independent commentary, not a statement of enacted policy.
Research essays and media writing
2026 | Research in Measurement & AI Evaluation
Recent peer-reviewed work in Communications AI & Computing, Acta Psychologica, and Discover Artificial Intelligence develops distinct methods for examining normative conflict, narrative–affect measurement, and affective interpretive failure.
View the full publication record
Featured Visual Evidence
Normative Collapse Follows a Rate Law
The Affective Thermodynamic Relationship · Communications AI & Computing (2026)
→ Read the article · → Behind the Paper: The Curve Was Stable. The Judgment Was Not.
Emotional AI Needs a Stress Test
Algorithmic Affective Blunting measures how emotional interpretation in a large language model degrades under rising semantic stress.
In a standardized single-model setting, mean Affective Degradation Index rose from 0.16 in Control to 2.92 in Extreme exposure.
The visual citation card turns the paper’s empirical collapse curve into a reusable research signal: emotional AI should be evaluated not only for apparent empathy, but for interpretative robustness under stress.
Status: Published in Discover Artificial Intelligence (2026).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-026-01573-w
From Data to Geometry to Measurement
ANAD v1.4.0
351,734 narratives represented through an open derived-feature research resource
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PLOS ONE
Mapping the geometry of narrative–affect discrepancy
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Acta Psychologica
Distinguishing net valence from affective energy
Together, these studies ask not whether narrative and emotion simply “match,” but what different forms of mismatch reveal about human expression and the systems designed to interpret it.
Featured Publication
Narrative–Affect Discrepancy Published in PLOS ONE (2026)
Narrative–affect discrepancy as a regulated degree of freedom in 351,734 relationship narratives
PLOS ONE, 21(5), e0348715 (2026)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0348715
Media coverage:
This paper maps narrative complexity and linguistically inferred affective intensity across 351,734 English-language relationship narratives. It treats narrative–affect discrepancy not as residual noise, but as a regulated expressive degree of freedom.
The study identifies four empirically separable expressive regimes: coupled expression, strategic understatement, strategic overstatement, and collapse. As a comparative probe, it projects an RLHF-aligned language model into the same coordinate system and finds that the model occupies an approximately 1.70× smaller expressive region than humans.
The paper contributes a reproducible geometric basis for comparing expressive degrees of freedom across human populations and aligned AI systems.
Behind the Paper:
How Emotional Discrepancy Stopped Looking Like Error
Long-form essay:
The Missing Coordinate in the RLHF Diversity Debate
Featured in PsyPost
A new study mapped 350,000 relationship stories and found a communication style AI struggles to copy
PsyPost, May 24, 2026
PsyPost covered Ryan SangBaek Kim’s PLOS ONE study on narrative–affect discrepancy, highlighting how people often communicate distress through restraint, understatement, silence, or expressive collapse, and why aligned AI systems may struggle to reproduce these quieter forms of human emotional expression.
Read the PsyPost article · Read the PLOS ONE paper
Selected Recent Work
Delegated Precision: A Predictive-Processing Hypothesis on External Affective Labelling and Self-Interpretation
Frontiers in Psychology (2026) · DOI
Recent published work spans AI evaluation and governance, narrative–affect measurement, human–AI interaction, and open research resources.
The affective thermodynamic relationship: an empirical information-theoretic scaling relationship for normative-conflict collapse in large language models
Communications AI & Computing (2026)
Narrative Complexity Is Weakly Coupled With Affective Energy, Not Net Valence, in Relationship Narratives
Acta Psychologica (2026)
Algorithmic affective blunting quantifies the collapse curve of interpretative failure in large language models
Discover Artificial Intelligence (2026)
Narrative–affect discrepancy as a regulated degree of freedom in 351,734 relationship narratives
PLOS ONE (2026)
Formal and Computational Foundations for Implementing Affective Sovereignty in Emotion AI Systems
Discover Artificial Intelligence (2026)
ANEST Narrative–Affect Dataset (ANAD v1): A Large-Scale Derived Feature Resource for Quantifying Narrative–Affective Discrepancy
Data in Brief (2026)
Additional manuscripts are in editorial assessment and peer review across psychology, philosophy, human–AI interaction, and AI governance; confidential venue information is not listed here.
Research
RRI advances a research program on emotion, selfhood, interpretive authority, and human-AI interaction.
Current lines of work include:
Affective Sovereignty
A normative and computational framework for protecting personal authority over emotional meaning in AI-mediated systems.
Affective Suppression Fatigue
A dynamical account of how chronic suppression can lead to numbing at low intensity and collapse at high intensity.
Algorithmic Affective Blunting and the Affective Thermodynamic Relationship
A research line on interpretive failure in large language models under affective and normative stress.
Narrative-Affect Geometry and Measurement
A research program examining how narrative structure, net emotional direction, and affective magnitude relate and diverge in human expression. ANAD provides the derived-feature infrastructure; the PLOS ONE study maps the geometry of narrative–affect discrepancy; and the Acta Psychologica study shows that apparent coupling between narrative complexity and affect depends critically on how affect and discrepancy are operationalised.
Resonant Amplification Framework
A mechanistic account of human-AI attachment, linguistic reinforcement, and intervention design.
Ecology of Inquiry
A metascientific line asking how research systems make certain questions thinkable, fundable, and governable.
Featured Book
The Interpreter's Seat
How the Power over Human Emotion Has Shifted
“To feel is biology. To interpret is power.”
This book traces the history of interpretive authority, from older systems of naming emotion to contemporary platforms that classify, stabilize, and act on feeling.
Written for readers already past introductory psychology, it brings together emotion, self-interpretation, dependence, narrative, and the politics of affective technology in a work of public intellectual nonfiction.
An independent POD first edition has been published and tested with paying readers. A revised and expanded commercial edition is now being prepared for publisher re-submission.
Recent
Narrative–Affect Discrepancy published
PLOS ONE (2026)
351,734 relationship narratives mapped into narrative–affect geometry; four expressive regimes and 1.70× aligned-model expressive-area contraction.
DOI · Behind the Paper · Essay
Affective Sovereignty published
Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature, 2026)
Formal framework for emotional AI governance introducing Sovereign-by-Design and DRIFT.
Resonant Amplification Framework published
Computers in Human Behavior Reports (Elsevier, 2026)
Mechanistic model of human–AI interaction and Cognitive Circuit Breakers.
ANAD v1 dataset released
Data in Brief (Elsevier, 2026)
351,734-text corpus for narrative–affect discrepancy research.
Media coverage and public writing
PsyPost (May 2026)
A new study mapped 350,000 relationship stories and found a communication style AI struggles to copy.
MIT Technology Review Korea (2026)
A series of essays on emotion AI, interpretive authority, and affective sovereignty.
AI Times (February 2026)
The Real Risk of Emotion AI Is Not Accuracy, but the Transfer of Interpretive Power.
Read PsyPost · Read MIT Technology Review Korea · Read AI Times
Creative Archive
Original music is preserved in a separate creative archive so the institute homepage remains research-first.
Selected 2026 album: Avant la lumière · Ryan Kim
Eleven classical works exploring memory, inward silence, and the passage toward light. Listen on Spotify.
Contact
Email: ryan@ryanresearch.org
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2751-496X
EurAI https://eurai.org/
BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT (SGAI) https://www.bcs-sgai.org/
KAIA – Korean Artificial Intelligence Association https://aiassociation.kr/
KASBA – Korean Academic Society of Business Administration https://kasba.or.kr/
IASEAI – International Association for Safe & Ethical AI https://www.iaseai.org/
SIpEIA – Italian Society for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence https://sipeia.it/
Nature Portfolio Community https://go.nature.com/users/ryan-sangbaek-kim
© 2026 Ryan Research Institute. All rights reserved.
Independent research in Human–AI Governance, Interpretive Authority, Affective Sovereignty, and AI Evaluation.
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