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I'm loving and appreciating being able to reengage again with the work
presented, and our conversations together here! Thank you Saba and Mark!
I really love this reading of ELIZA, and I know this question of AI came
up in Week Two, with Tung-Hui and Neil's questions on AI and labor.
More soon, but I'm still thinking of these questions of gender. Years
ago, I wrote a short piece on the Turing Test Tournament game I helped
design, and gender here: http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/on-beauty/
Your questions on software, and bots, and racial
formation/intersectionality are really pressing, and covers areas that
are not often discussed within the study and creation of bots.
Thinking of your insightful work, it reminds me of Darius Kazemi's work
with Twitter Bots and activism too:
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201507312202-0024927
This is all exciting, and love to hear what others have done in terms of
chatbots, and the engagement with gender, race, and other markers of
difference. Im still thinking about this all, because I do feel chatbots
lead us somewhere needed...
On 2017-05-24 08:03, Mark Marino wrote:
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Margaret mentioned that my talk reflected on bots from the standpoint
of intersectionality. Along with racial and ethnic
performances/impositions of/on chatbots, I also reflected on gender.
Gender and race/ethnicity, sexuality, all of these arise from this
tendency to make machines in our own image. Noah Wardrip-Fruin's
"ELIZA effect" (in _Expressive Processing_) which names our tendency
to anthropomorphize software even with very little evidence of that
humanity, draws in name from a highly charged history. The name
carries an allusion to power-relations and gender construction (i.e.,
Eliza Doolittle), as re-emagined in Joseph Weizenbaum's conversation
program, the first chatbot. Though I don't think Noah intended this,
the ELIZA effect, points to our tendency to assign gender (and other
identity characteristics) to computational machines -- and we do this
to other machines as well. (Is your car/computer male or female? How
do you know?) Of course, the Turing Test had already intertwined the
notion of conversational software and gender performance.
In the case of chatbots, you begin with a machine acting like a human,
carrying out one of our most human activities, conversing. Humanity
is, of course, wrapped in subject positions and intersubjective
interactions. Chatbots thereby become evocative objects for our
concepts of race and gender and sexuality and socio-economic status.
But there's even more going on -- since Pygmalion-like, we construct
these artificial others to chat with an imagined user, who is of
course a proxy for us. These are the bots of our dreams.
As you mentioned, Machine Dreams engendered another conference, The
Inadequate Human at CSUCI, organized by the fabulous duo, Soraya
Zarook and Ande Murphy. At that conference, I also had the chance to
hear Joan Peters talk on the Amazon Siri, Alexa. You'll notice the
shared affinities with what I was discussing in what grew into her
paper: The “Robettes” are Coming: Siri, Alexa, and my GPS Lady
http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz15/reviews/peters-the-robettes-are-coming.htm
Check out that paper. It carries these ideas even further.
All of this leads to some questions: what does gender add to our sense
of the robot? How is the concept of robots already gendered? Do we
envision gender as a software running on our hardware, evoked or
produced through interactions.
Best,
Mark
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empyre forum
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--
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
University of Oregon
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empyre forum
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