What do we Want from Bots?

Jentery Sayers & Tiffany Chan

"The animating ideas here are augmentation; partnership; call and response.

The goal is not to make writing “easier”; it’s to make it harder.

The goal is not to make the resulting text “better”; it’s to make it different — weirder, with effects maybe not available by other means."

—Robin Sloan, "Writing with the machine"

What do we want from bots?

Absurdity, humour, surprise, playfulness

Twitter bot 

A program that algorithmically generates content and posts it to Twitter, rather than require a human to create each tweet manually

April is the cruellest month,...mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

It seems like one of those nights,
This place is too crowded.
Too many cool kids,

uh uh, uh uh

Animated GIF of one cycle of activation, including prediction (forward prop.) and comparing/adjusting its guesses (back prop.). Animation sampled from a GIF by Wil C.

The repetition or performance of a gender ideal that, despite all attempts, is never realized as authentic.

"An imitation without an original." 

Performativity

Queer Computing

multiple forms vs. single stable ideal

indeterminacy vs. positivism

"failures" or alternatives vs. normative definitions of success

“In acknowledging, accepting, and even producing failure, queer computation seeks to make clear the values and assumptions that drive our culture of technological development and to offer alternate modes for living with and through technology.”

— Jacob Gaboury, "Critical Unmaking"

Thank you!