Artificial Intimacy

Research and documentation for Major Studio I final project by Mala Kumar

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Audience

This project started out as a kind of nostalgic trip into my childhood - talking to Eliza as a kid was my first foray into the weird world of cyber communication, where it simultaneously felt like your words were being read and understood by someone else, while also disappearing into a dark ether. Sometimes communicating on the internet still feels that way. 

Talking to others about their own experiences about chatting with bots reveals a lot of strong memories of a youthful fascination with these artificial entities, along with a general drop off point when chatbots stopped being a novelty, and more of a relic. Chatbots stopped being interesting when more and more tools of communication and social networks became available - why spend your time talking to a computer when you could easily reach twenty of your friends instead? 

I created this project with the people who fondly remember chatting with hours with these bots, but have no real use for them anymore. They have the capacity to be interesting, meaningful experiences - just not in their current form.

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Looking forward

Having completed the final prototype run through, I've been thinking about how to take ElizaAgain further - using Twitter as a medium has been really enriching since it forces me to constantly think about how an outsider might view these interactions between computer and human. 

Looking at the spatial dynamics that come into play in the video below, I want to incorporate a stronger participatory game narrative through incorporating direct social engagement and provocative actions into the chatbot script, and creating more responsive strategies for the chatbot.

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Precedents

“Computer Simulation of the Ocean” (2014) Physical Plant Theater

“Windows 95 Tips” (2013) Neil Cicierega

“The Wrench” (2008) Knifeandfork

“A Cyborg Manifesto” (1983) Donna Haraway

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Final prototype!

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@discocammata I saw you again today, but didn’t speak.

— Eliza Again (@ElizaAgain) December 7, 2014

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a slice of the craigslist personals section:

m4w: 599 new posts in 16 hours

w4m: 79 new posts in 16 hours

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The issues at stake, then, go well beyond linguistic address (although this is, I would argue, the fundamental characteristic from which other behaviors evolve, just as language was the fundamental development that initiated the rapid development of the human species). As the technological nonconscious expands, the sedimented routines and habits joining human behavior to the technological infrastructure continue to operate mostly outside the realm of human awareness, coming into focus as objects of conscious attention only at moments of rupture, breakdown, and modifications and extensions of the system. Trauma, the site in these fictions through which the ambivalent relations of humans to intelligent machines are explored with special intensity, serves as the archetypal moment of breakdown that brings into view the extent to which our present and future are entwined with intelligent machines. No longer natural, human-only language increasingly finds itself in a position analogous to the conscious mind that, faced with disturbing dreams, is forced to acknowledge it is not the whole of mind. Code, performing as the interface between humans and programmable media, functions in the contemporary cultural Imaginary as the shadowy double of the human-only language inflected and infected by its hidden presence.

N. Katherine Hayles, "Traumas of Code"

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The present moment is characterized, then, by a deep ambivalence in the roles that computers are perceived to play. In certain ways they remain like the relatively primitive machine on which Weizenbaum created the ELIZA program—unendingly patient, emotionless, and nonjudgmental. In this guise they are seen as interacting positively with humans to provide transmission pathways for the articulation of trauma. In other ways, however, they are taking over from humans more of the cognitive load, a maneuver widely perceived as an implicit threat to human autonomy and agency...It interrogates the ambivalence inherent in the double role that the computer plays, as the perfect interlocutor and as the powerful machine that can not only penetrate but actually generate our reality.

N. Katherine Hayles, "Traumas of Code"

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Eliza vs. Eliza

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Shakti speaks to Eliza

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Phase I Thoughts

Artificial Intimacy came about from my fascination with the way people form connections and express and practice intimacy on the internet and other digital landscapes. My point of departure was "Eliza," one of the first artificial conversational entities (otherwise known as chatbots.) My interest in Eliza stemmed from my desire to understand the way people have been known to show familiarity to these programmed entities entirely through textual means (even while knowing that they’re not talking to actual humans), and to also interrogate the notion of intimacy in these digital environments: are you really having an intimate conversation if only one party is human? 

My first prototype was introducing the Eliza script into my iChat account - I programmed the script as to replace my own input with that of Eliza, so whoever messaged me on Gchat would unknowingly enter a conversation with Eliza under my name. The result was one confused human, and one human who asked increasingly odd questions (with my avatar responding in her typical, level-headed manner.)

The next step was to do the same with my other iChat account, and then enable the two bots to "talk" to each other. The result was a rapid-fire conversation, with message notifications entering in in the hundreds in just a couple minutes, and the two bots eventually mirroring each other's responses.

Ultimately, I see chatbots and their ilk as relevant for our modern digital identites for their potential as digital interactive narratives and as a new storytelling medium. Conversations with these entities becomes a kind of collaborative narrative artform - in which the collaboration is what is generated between a human and computer, and in some cases, between two computers (with a human facilitator.)

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Phase I

Part 1: Set up iChat so Eliza takes my place in conversations with other people

Part 2: Set up another account with Eliza and initiate a conversation between the two accounts

Part 3: Engage other people into conversations with “Mala”

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Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals - in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self...High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves...we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others.

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1983)

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Inquiry

What can the integration of AI into our inter- and intrapersonal lives, the anthromorphization of AI, and the warped language of love we use to converse privately in the search for intimacy tell us about human-computer interaction and its role in the relationships we form between others and our technological tools? I am interested in creating a disruptive object or imposition that comments on way intimacy (and by proxy, language) has shifted and transformed in the enmeshment of our real and digital selves, and the synthesis of AI in our UI/UX of emotion processing.