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Automation, Algorithms, and Politics| Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay


 
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1. Title Title of document Automation, Algorithms, and Politics| Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay
 
2. Creator Author's name, affiliation, country Gina Neff; Oxford Internet Institute and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford; United Kingdom
 
2. Creator Author's name, affiliation, country Peter Nagy; Arizona State University; United States
 
3. Subject Discipline(s)
 
3. Subject Keyword(s) bots, human–computer interaction, agency, affordance, artificial intelligence
 
4. Description Abstract

In 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, an experimental artificial intelligence chat bot. Learning from interactions with Twitter users, Tay was shut down after one day because of its obscene and inflammatory tweets. This article uses the case of Tay to re-examine theories of agency. How did users view the personality and actions of an artificial intelligence chat bot when interacting with Tay on Twitter? Using phenomenological research methods and pragmatic approaches to agency, we look at what people said about Tay to study how they imagine and interact with emerging technologies and to show the limitations of our current theories of agency for describing communication in these settings. We show how different qualities of agency, different expectations for technologies, and different capacities for affordance emerge in the interactions between people and artificial intelligence. We argue that a perspective of “symbiotic agency”—informed by the imagined affordances of emerging technology—is required to really understand the collapse of Tay.
 
5. Publisher Organizing agency, location USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
 
6. Contributor Sponsor(s) European Research Council; National Science Foundation
 
7. Date (YYYY-MM-DD) 2016-10-12
 
8. Type Status & genre Peer-reviewed Article
 
8. Type Type
 
9. Format File format PDF
 
10. Identifier Uniform Resource Identifier https://ijoc.org:443/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6277
 
11. Source Title; vol., no. (year) International Journal of Communication; Vol 10 (2016)
 
12. Language English=en en
 
13. Relation Supp. Files
 
14. Coverage Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.)
 
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