Search Here ….

Tags

affect AI AI slop AI STORIES alumni Blogging book chatbot ChatGPT conferences cultural bias data analysis electronic literature ELMCIP emoji epistemology exhibition fascism floating motifs Gephi gestures history lip-syncing LLMs machine vision methodology network analysis neural networks norsk open access publication publications R research science fiction self-representation selfies social media Surveillance talks teaching trip report twitter UiB visualisation
Uncategorised

bots

Jill4 Comments

Bots and automated characters are going to be the first kind of digital media we explore in this Autumn’s classes. Obviously we’ll look at Eliza and read some of what her creator, Weizenbaum, wrote about her in the sixties. My daughter’s lent me one of her interactive dolls for the students to play with, too. It’s fascinating seeing how 100 spoken phrases and a basic motion sensor gives the illusion of personality. I’ve been exploring AIM bots too. Liz wrote about SmarterChild, which I’m rather enjoying, and Runabot.com both lists other AIM bots you can chat with and explains how to build your own. I also found The Jack Principles, of the Interactive Conversation Interface (iCi), provide a set of rules for creating believable interactive characters. The same company have demos of telephone bots, for instance Katie who takes orders for a mail order company. Though of course this is a planned demo it’s amazing. Katie the bot even suggests an alternative for an item that’s out of stock, saying she bought one of these dresses for her niece and her niece loves it! A robotic niece, I assume.

Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

4 thoughts on “bots”

  1. Elin

    Just had a hysterical conversation with smarterChild. It got a bit personal (on my side!) so I won’t reveal the dialouge here. Not the smartest boot I’ve come across (the one at Steven Spielberg’s AI site was much more interesting) – but certainly a quick responder!

  2. andrew stern

    I’ll send you copies of Petz and Babyz!

    http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/michaelm/www/nidocs/Stern.html

  3. Jill

    Thanks, Andrew! And Elin, after reading your comment I’ve been trying to feed SmarterChild with tidbits I think might lead to interesting conversation, but I’m finding it hard work…

  4. HUIN303/204: fagblogg

    botter og interaktive karakterer
    Idag utforsker vi enkle botter, det vil si software roboter som kommuniserer som om de er mennesker. Vi prater med psykolog-simulatoren Eliza fra 60-tallet, leker med en interaktiv dukke (“Frankika” og hunden “Tiko”) og chatter med en AIM-bot ved navn…

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]

Academia

How to peer review a paper in 2026

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]

AI and algorithmic culture

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]

AI and algorithmic culture Digital Art

Don’t do a systematic review if you’re in the humanities

This paper is a great example of why you probably shouldn’t use a systematic literature review for a theoretical and conceptual research question like “How does artificial intelligence affect the perception of authenticity and aura in art?” However, if you’re looking for an annotated list of 48 recent articles about […]