ok one class is now officially over. The giant paper is going well. I’ve submitted my thesis topic to a conference. I’m strung out and tired but makin’ progress.

2 Classes to wrap.

24×7 Chat Walkers : How artificial intelligence prostitutes commodify fantasy in online chat rooms

In this paper I examine how bots, computer programs written to mimic human behavior, are used by the adult industry to persuade individuals in online chat rooms to join pornographic websites. These bots are optimized to take advantage of the structure of cybersex interaction genres in order to fool chatters into thinking that they are talking with another human. Via a semiotic analysis of recorded interactions between humans and these machines as humans I demonstrate how bots rely on a chatter’s desire to be recruited into a voicing role (Bakhtin), based on cultural notions of sexuality, that gives them permission to transform their fantasies into a performative textual experience. In doing so I analyze how a bot’s user profile (identity) and response script (voice) are constructed to take advantage of preexisting stereotyped sexual fantasies and instantiate and propagate gender stereotypes. I explore how bots allow the adult industry to control both the production of fantasies and the living out of them as well. Finally, I consider the socioethical implications of these machines that “pretend” to be human. Through ethnographic interviews conducted with bot creators and chatters who interact with bots the paper explores how individuals in chat rooms react to bots and to chatters who mistake them for humans. I demonstrate how these dialogs can be viewed as part of a larger discourse on the ever expanding role of technology in our public and private lives.

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.