Ryan Kim
Founder & Principal Investigator
Affective Sovereignty · Emotion AI Governance · Human-AI Interaction · AI Ethics
Ryan Research Institute
Ryan Research Institute is a Paris-based independent research institute studying interpretive authority in AI-mediated emotional life.
Across its research program, RRI asks a single question: when systems infer, classify, or act on emotion, who retains the authority to decide what that feeling means?
Affective Sovereignty is the institute’s core program for protecting first-person interpretive standing under technological and institutional mediation. The work connects emotion AI governance, human–AI interaction, narrative–affect geometry, philosophy of mind, and institutional design.
This site presents peer-reviewed research, open research resources, books, visual research materials, and selected public scholarship.
Subscribe to the research newsletter: profryankim.substack.com
Latest
AI Watermarking, Authorship & Interpretive Authority — Current Work
New research agenda on the relationship between technical provenance signals, intellectual contribution, and institutional evidentiary use.
→ English essay: Can Claude’s Watermark Prove AI Authorship? · → 한국어: 클로드 워터마크는 AI가 쓴 글을 증명할 수 있을까?
Status: Research agenda initiated August 2026 · Empirical protocol in development
Algorithmic Affective Blunting — Published
Discover Artificial Intelligence, 2026 · DOI: 10.1007/s44163-026-01573-w
Mental AI — Public Preprint
Post-Deployment Criterion Endogeneity in the Causal Loop of Human Mental Life · DOI: 10.20944/preprints202607.2118.v1
Policy Translation — AI Times Korea
Public policy work on interpretive rights, correction, and meaningful human review in high-impact AI, published 11 August 2026.
Featured Visual Evidence
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
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
Recent published work spans emotion AI governance, human-AI interaction, synthetic affective data generation, and narrative–affect measurement.
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 (Springer Nature, 2026)
Interrupting Resonant Amplification
Computers in Human Behavior Reports (Elsevier, 2026)
ANEST Narrative–Affect Dataset (ANAD v1)
Data in Brief (Elsevier, 2026)
DefMoN: A Reproducible Framework for Theory-Grounded Synthetic Data Generation in Affective AI
Machine Learning with Applications (Elsevier, 2025/2026)
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
A program on how narrative complexity and affective intensity diverge in human expression, treating discrepancy not as error but as a regulated expressive degree of freedom.
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.
Full manuscript completed. Currently under agent review.
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
Music
RRI also archives original musical work, from orchestral textures to contemporary minimalism.
New Album: 살아내는 중입니다 (2025)
A full-length emotional narrative across 11 tracks, released on major platforms.
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.
A research institute for emotion, interpretation, and the ethics of AI.
Research🔒 BACKUP — Research — 2026-08-17 15:34 KSTPublications🔒 BACKUP — Publications — 2026-08-17 15:34 KSTBooksMusicAbout🔒 BACKUP — About — 2026-08-17 15:34 KSTNewsletterHome(KR)🔒 BACKUP — Home(KR) — 2026-08-17 15:34 KST