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Bots I Have Met

Meeting these dif­fer­ent bots has just rein­forced one thing: the images that you’re cap­tur­ing, the online col­lec­tions you’re shar­ing, just pro­vide a foun­da­tion for all dif­fer­ent ways of engag­ing your audi­ence. The more acces­si­ble your con­tent is, the more open the licens­es you use, the more chance you’ve got of hav­ing your con­tent used in new and dif­fer­ent ways. 

Bots and the Rise of Digital Folk Art

I’m inter­est­ed in what hap­pens when artists who are used to being artists decide that the best place for a work is with­in a space that seems to require an entire­ly dif­fer­ent method of con­struc­tion. And of course, there’s no harsh line between forms, and plen­ty of peo­ple exist both as highly-proficient work­ing artists and excep­tion­al­ly skilled pro­gram­mers. Tons of them, right? But I’m not talk­ing so much about the skill or even back­ground. Instead of I’m inter­est­ed in mentality.

Don’t Be Human

With Twitter bots and a lot of AI in pop sci­ence, it’s kind of like stay­ing up late with your par­ents. Once you ask to be treat­ed like a human being, you have to abide by a dif­fer­ent set of rules. You have to be extra good. And the sec­ond you mis­be­have, you get sent to bed. Because you did­n’t play by the rules that you were agree­ing to be judged by.

Building Personable Machines

When Darius asked me to speak I had to think a lit­tle bit about what I would say to peo­ple who make soft­ware agents, which I think is real­ly real­ly cool. And to me, in think­ing about it, I think what is a bot to me? A bot is fun­da­men­tal­ly a piece of soft­ware that involves per­son­al­i­ty. And I’ve had a long-running inter­est in build­ing phys­i­cal robots that have per­son­al­i­ty of vary­ing degrees. So I pro­posed to give a talk about that.

How Thinking about Translation Can Help You Think about Bots

The com­mon­ly asked ques­tions is, Does this bot sound human?” And the ques­tion that I think is a lit­tle bit more inter­est­ing is why do so many bots that win the Loebner Prize sound pret­ty much exact­ly the same? They’re real­ly sim­i­lar to each oth­er. Maybe they all have a par­tic­u­lar type of default human being in mind, the peo­ple who design these bots. But if so, who is this par­tic­u­lar mys­te­ri­ous default human being?

Haunted Machines Morning Panel

Pretty much any­thing that Lucifer says in Paradise Lost, you could prob­a­bly imag­ine the CEO of Uber say­ing. They’re just dis­rupt­ing the Heavenly orders, you know. They real­ly need­ed it.

Exploring (Semantic) Space With (Literal) Robots

I’ve made it my goal as a com­put­er poet not to imi­tate exist­ing poet­ry but to find new ways for poet­ry to exist. So what I’m going to do in this talk is take this metaphor of explor­ing lit­er­a­ture to its log­i­cal conclusion.

Strange Bedfellows: Digital Humanities, Internet Art, and the Weird Internet

I’m here at MITH today, and I want­ed to talk a lit­tle bit about dig­i­tal human­i­ties from my posi­tion as an inter­est­ed out­sider. I’ve always kept a fin­ger in acad­e­mia, at first through game stud­ies and peo­ple study­ing video games, and more recent­ly through elec­tron­ic lit­er­a­ture and those fields. I’m not going to go into a what is it?” debate because I know every­one who’s in dig­i­tal human­i­ties is very tired of those, but we know when we see it, right?

Publishing and Preserving Bots

We want to con­tex­tu­al­ize the bots for the audi­ence of the ELC3, peo­ple who study and are inter­est­ed in elec­tron­ic lit­er­a­ture. To frame bots as a kind of elec­tron­ic lit­er­a­ture. To link to the live bot on Twitter. But we also want to offer mate­ri­als so those bots can be stud­ied. We want to pre­serve it for future gen­er­a­tions. So what does this mean, exactly?

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