Committee:
Toby Miller, Chair
N. Katherine Hayles
Emory Elliott
Abstract:
Amidst the various forms of electronic literature stands a class of interactive programs that simulates human conversation. A chatbot, or chatterbot, is a program with which users can “speak,” typically by exchanging text through an instant-messaging style interface. Chatbots have been therapists, Web site hosts, language instructors, and even performers in interactive narratives. Over the past ten years, they have proliferated across the Internet, despite being based on a technology that predates the Web by thirty years. In my readings, these chatbots are synedochic of the process by which networked identities form on the Internet within the power dynamics of hegemonic masculinity. Chatbots, in this light, model the collaborative performance humans enact on electronically-mediated networks.
These computer programs stand as the nexus of various roads of inquiry and present a useful model for gender construction and racial formation enacted over electronically-mediated networks. Chatbots are actor-networks, bringing together programmers, artists, and machines to develop interactive entities. To match their interdisciplinarity, this dissertation brings together humanities, scientific, and sociological approaches to analyze chatbots in their broader historical and cultural context. Particularly, I blend textual analysis, cultural studies, and survey research. Central to the work is a survey of the makers and users of chatbots. Once a sense of the makeup of the community has been determined, subsequent chapters apply race, gender, and labor theories to the interpretation of specific chatbots in action. These interpretations are preceded by a look at Alan Turing, whose provocations about imitating humanity and performing gender set the tone for the debates that surround chatbots.
The chatbots in this dissertation are used for websites, interactive fiction, interactive drama, adult entertainment, and educational contexts. From ELIZA to A.L.I.C.E., these chatbots span the history of chatbots, ending contemporary applications, such as Tactical Iraqi, Façade, and my own Barthes’ Bachelorette. In this context, this dissertation enters debates about narratology and ludology, offering directed poetics and systemic exploration in its place. The dissertation also considers other relevant cultural objects, such as the Chess-Playing Turk and cinematic cyborgs appearing in Simone , Thomas est Amoureux ( Thomas in Love), and Blade Runner.
Table of Contents
Introduction |
1 |
Chapter 1: A Network of Approaches |
20 |
Chapter 2: Turing and His Games, Ontological Turing Machines |
78 |
Chapter 3: Botmasters and Bot users, a Survey |
121 |
Chapter 4: Engines of Difference |
148 |
Chapter 5: Sex, Work, and the Chatbot |
244 |
Chapter 6: Chatbots at the Movies, Blade Runner, S1m0ne, and Thomas in Love |
345 |
Conclusion |
428 |
Works Cited |
433 |
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Classroom Technologies
22 Short Films about Grammar
Machinima for the Classroom, these Films use Activision's The Movies to present a series of short scenes that focus on common grammaticla errors. |
Full
Project Descriptions:
a show of hands
Barthes' Bachelorette
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Courses I teach:
Writing 140
Writing and Critical Reasoning
Writing 340
Advanced Composition
(1 section: computer emphasis)
Writing 501
Courses I have taught:
New Media Workshop
Literature and
Psychology
Creative Writing
Workshop
Humor Writing Workshop
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I, Chatbot is an extended object study interpreting conversational agents with particular attention to the ways in which they engage in negotiations of idenity with hegemonic masculinity and white cyberculture. 