This is my first shot at the abstract for my paper. I may be submitting to a upcomming school conference and I needed to get this together.

24×7 Chat Walkers : How artificial intelligence prostitutes are commoditizing fantasy in online chat rooms
In this paper I examine how bots, programs that are written to function as humans, are being used by the adult industry to persuade chat room participants to join pornographic websites. I demonstrate how a semiotic analysis of these interactions between humans and machines as humans reveals how identity and performative gender stereotypes influence and evolve online interactions. In particular I will explore how these bot’s user profiles and response scripts are optimized to take advantage of naïve chatters preexisting sexual fantasies, in order to fool the chatter into thinking that they are talking with another human. In order to do this I will demonstrate how the adult industry both monetizes the creation these fantasies and these human/bot online interactions. Finally, I will consider the socioethical implications of machines that “pretend” to be human. Though ethnographic interviews conducted with bot creators and chatters who interact with bots I will explore how individuals treat bots and chatters who mistake them for humans.