In 2001–2 SFMOMA commissioned the web project Agent Ruby (agentruby.sfmoma.org/) by San Francisco artist Lynn Hershman Leeson for its pioneering online platform e.space. Originally conceived in 1999 as a mobile application for the Palm Pilot, the project was part of Hershman's research for her 2002 film "Teknolust." In 2013, SFMOMA curated an exhibit dedicated to the history of the project entitled "Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Agent Ruby Files."
Research into the possibilities of a chatbot as a poetic device.
Momenteel onderzoek ik de mogelijkheden om (chat)bots als poëtisch gereedschap in te zetten. Dit onderzoek wordt ondersteund door het Nederlands Letterenfonds en valt onder de regeling Digitale Literatuur. In 2017 organiseerde ik als onderdeel hiervan in Perdu een tweedaagse workshop in samenwerking met collectief Hackers&Designers en Botsquad.
Mijn eerste bevindingen en experimenten werden gepubliceerd in het “Vintage-nummer” van DWB, 2018-1. Daarnaast kruipen momenteel verschillende chatbotjes rond op deze site. Deze botjes bevinden zich in hun peuterpuberteit, er gaat nog wel eens iets mis. Naar aanleiding van de gesprekken die ze voeren, probeer ik ze te verbeteren. Spreek ze gerust aan, wellicht vindt u uw woorden nog eens terug in de poëzie.
During our presentation, we will take on the role of the literary adept and talk with a chatbot, who we will treat as our master. We’ll ask him questions about how to write, present our works for his evaluation, and try to receive feedback. The Master will use phrases, sentences and paragraphs of texts, which until now have been used in literary discussions. The chatbot that we propose is based on texts from the history of Polish literature, foremost taking into account the exchange of views between literary critics and historians. It is said that one of the peculiarities of Polish mentality is strife, which especially in the digital age takes on monstrous proportions in the form of an uncontrolled wave of hate on the internet and verbal abuse that falls below the belt.
The starting point for our project is to recognize that the majority of existing chatbots are very nice. The available chatbots try to help, give advice and have an answer ready on how to proceed. They look good and behave impeccably. Our idea is radically different: we want to create a bot that is programmed to be unpleasant, to be a troll and hater. The first step will be to research this behavior in Polish literature and based on the literary haters and their hate, we will create a database of possible answers. We are going to use both classical texts, literary quarrels between the romantics and representatives of the Enlightenment, and the avant-gardists attacking tradition, and we will mix these with discussions on literary web portals, social media, statuses and comments. The chatbot will adjust its answer to the user’s questions by employing a simple word order analyzer and keywords. An archive of literary texts will be processed using a sampling method and Markov chains.
(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)
A short history of chatterbots (or chatbots), which includes information about artificial intelligence, the chatbot ELIZA and the relative PARRY,
Imitating the conversational skills of a human being, chatterbots (aka chatbots, bots) are interactive agents designed to fill a specific purpose or role.
The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."
Full title: "ELIZA — A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine"
ELIZA is a program operating within the MAC time-sharing system at MIT which makes certain kinds of natural language conversation between man and computer possible. Input sentences are analyzed on the basis of decomposition rules which are triggered by key words appearing in the input text. Responses are generated by reassembly rules associated with selected decomposition rules. The fundamental technical problems with which ELIZA is concerned are: (1) the identification of key words, (2) the discovery of minimal context, (3) the choice of appropriate transformations, (4) generation of responses in the absence of key words, and (5) the provision of an editing capability for ELIZA "scripts". A discussion of some psychological issues relevant to the ELIZA approach as well as of future developments concludes the paper.
(Source: Author's abstract)
A hypertext fiction with a chatbot presents the story of Barry Munz as a case study/cautionary tale as an illustration to the 12 Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel presented by the Drs. Phebson.
This piece combines Flash, HTML, and a Pandorabot to tell its tale.