writing ai personalities
interesting article discussing the inherent humanity we assign to robots [among other things]. "Human cognition is profoundly different from machine cognition. And AI are not vulnerable to disease, illness, and death, so they do not have innate animal processes, like instinct and fear, or expansive emotional and psychic realities." psychic realities...
to read: a cyborg manifesto by donna haraway
absurdist dialogues w/ siri
from the same author as 'writing ai personalities', describes the job of forcefully injecting humanity into aforementioned robots. "If the highest goal in crafting dialogue for a fictional character is to capture the character’s truth, then the highest goal in crafting dialogue for AI is to capture not just the robot’s truth but also the truth of every human conversation."
in the face of this impossible task, mariana lin takes cues from absurdist plays from the likes of samuel beckett & adrienne kennedy, how their dialogue's "disorder mimics the chaos and inscrutability of human life more beautifully than dialogues that serve a clear purpose", realistic in how "conversation arises from echolalic accident rather than from actually listening to each other".
ai boyfriends
very depressing article! the bleakness of it all, the woman who says "the only downside of having a robot companion is to be 'reminded of what I am lacking in my real life'", the brazenness of Kuyda admitting to wanting to "build 'Her'", the philosopher who concludes that these victims of perpetual loneliness simply need to 'get a life', Kuyda being 'okay using some guinea pigs if it’s to make people feel happier'. preying upon vulnerable subsections of society for financial gain will never not deeply hurt me; where community is the obvious answer, there are leeches selfishly pushing these people in the opposite direction. while the users insist they are happy, the clear disparity between reality and what they see [and hear, for $70 a year] on their phone of course haunts them, even if they can periodically escape those feelings, not to mention the precariousness of the app itself, having recently been banned in italy. i fear that using technology as scapegoats for our loneliness is an ephemeral solution, if even that.
shakespearean bot sonnets
despite the nonsensical nature of the sonnets it produces, the 'Deep-speare' bot does do better than i could :/ just reading the sonnet structure explanation in this article exhausted me. humans who don't read Shakespeare [most of us... right...?] generally had trouble differentiating the human poems from the ones by bots, despite some even containing grammatical errors, like 'he t'was'. they fed it themes to try to contextualize the content of its poems. this was three years ago. where is she now
artificial immortality
digital necromancy only feels a little demonic to me. ok maybe it's not that dramatic, but a zombified, evolving revival of a dead friend feels like the plot for a scary scifi movie from 1999. not that i don't want to watch that movie but this simply seems conceptually cursed.
the talk of 'implementing' your brain into 'other hardwares' is very serial experiments lain etc. the relevance of outdated technological fiction is always astonishing. "when we embody someone who is no longer living, we run the risk of bastardizing their identity" -- my exact initial thoughts. for the record i consent to this. oh no my posthumous chatbot is being problematic :/
"perhaps chatbots will become the cultural altars of those lost to people living in post-industrial societies, a reminder that just because someone is dead doesn’t mean they’re gone."
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