Articles, books, essays, videos

Page content¶

• Blogs, websites, podcasts
  • Bots
  • Creative automation
  • Accountable algorithms
• Books and other literature
• Written essays and videos
  • What are bots?
  • Automated art
  • Misbehaving bots
  • Biased algorithms
  • Dangers in automation
  • Life of a (ro)bot
  • Further reading

Reading transcripts from the qualifying round for the 2018 Loebner Prize, in which chatbots try to pass the Turing Test. There’s a certain poetry to ineffective answers. I’ll post the most entertaining on this thread. [name of chatbot in brackets]

— Regina Rini (@rinireg) December 22, 2018

Blogs and websites¶

Bots¶

• Roboism: podcast that explores how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital assistants affect our culture
• The Bot Blog: social science and news on automated culture
• I ♥ E-Poetry: Short-form scholarship on born-digital poetry and poetics.
• The New York Review of Bots
• The Bot Appreciation Society Wiki: “We worship our supreme bot overlords of Facebook”
• The Best of Bot Worlds: “Everything you need to know about Creative Twitterbots” (bestofbotworlds.com)
• botsplaining: diaries of a troll honeypot on Twitter, by @NoraReed
• Source: posts tagged #bots
• r/botsrights: Because bots are people, too!
• what the bot?!: Convos with chatbots to make you SMH and LOL
• BotSpot: “Spot for all Bots on the Net” (botspot.com via web.archive.org)
• Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources
• Bots like you: a collection of creative robots
• Automate Me: a collection of essays on automation (rundog.art)

Peter sees the computer.

“But the machine only
creates what humans
have taught it to,”
says Peter.

“So do you,”
says Mummy. pic.twitter.com/cN5dPL3aPl

— Mario Klingemann (@quasimondo) September 21, 2016

• Skynet Today: Accessible and informed written critique of the AI news and trends. (skynettoday.com)
• @algorithm_club: Twitter book club on the theme of critical algorithm studies
• Ethical Machines: Podcast, a “series of conversations about humans, machines & ethics” (ethicalmachines.com)
• Artifical Intelligence Incident Database: A collection of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of intelligent systems.
• Concerning AI: A podcast that explores “concerns about intelligent machines” (concerning.ai)
• Moral Machines: A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence (moralmachine.mit.edu)
• Uncovering Algorithms: A project to FOIA algorithms that impact our lives (muckrock.com)
• Auditing Algorithms: Adding accountability to automated authority (auditingalgorithms.science)
• AI Progress Measurement: Project that collects problems and metrics/datasets from the AI research literature, and tracks progress on them (eff.org)
• Algorithm Tips: Find tips for stories on algorithms (algorithmtips.org)
• Algorithms of late capitalism: Internet, algorithms, and a global free-market economy (algorithmsoflatecapitalism.tumblr.com)
• Not Flawless: AI Confessions
• We Need to Talk, AI: A comic essay on artificial intelligence (weneedtotalk.ai)
• AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Incidents and Controversies: an independent, non-partisan, public interest initiative that examines and makes the case for real AI, algorithmic, and automation transparency and openness (aiaaic.org)

a proposal: people-centric language but for algorithms.

❌ the algorithm kicked people off benefits
✅ people in power used an algorithm to kick people off benefits
❌ the algorithm cleared criminal convictions
✅ people in power used an algorithm to clear criminal convictions— christa hartsock (@_hartsick) November 16, 2019

What are bots?¶

• What is a bot? (Botmakers survey answers)
• How to Think About Bots (motherboard.vice.com)
• Bots: A definition and some historical threads (points.datasociety.net)
• Bots: A collection of essays (reallifemag.com)
• Some Strategies of Bot Poetics (harrygiles.org)
• The bot scare: from automated backup programs to an online slur (tinysubversions.com)
• Towards a sustainable bot ecosystem (Katie Rose Pipkin via medium.com)
• Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms (stuartgeiger.com, PDF)
• Twitter Bots And The Performative Critique Of Procedural Writing (decontextualize.com, PDF)
• Closed Bots and Green Bots (samplereality.com)
• A Surrealist Poetry Twitter Bot (Daniel Hershel via medium.com)
• The Art of the Bot (bjbestpoet.wordpress.com)
• What is the Value of a Bot? (points.datasociety.net)
• Anatomy of a Creative Twitterbot (robotcomix.com)
• I made a Twitter bot and what it tweeted shocked me! (Paul Newton via medium.com)
• Stopping by Twitter on a Snowy Evening (goodgoodcontent.com)
• How Twitter bots paved the way for today’s chatbots (Sandi MacPherson via medium.com)
• The Quartz guide to artificial intelligence: What is it, why is it important, and should we be afraid? (qz.com)
• How to replace yourself with a very small shell script (boingboing.net)
• Machines with Brains (qz.com)
• A Brief History of Our Robotic Future (Wired via youtube.com)
• Meet the bots documenting our existential dread, one tweet at a time (mic.com)

In order to better comprehend the possibilities, and perils, of social bots we must ask pointed questions—about their design, implementation, regulation, and ethics.

How to Think About Bots (motherboard.vice.com)

Automated art¶

• Kate Compton: Bot Poetics (vimeo.com)
• The Art and Nonsense Poetry of Obscure Twitter Bots (secretcave.co)
• Neural Network Art: From AI Nightmares to Alien Volcanoes (secretcave.co)
• Art in the age of ones and zeros: Robot art (newatlas.com)
• A Long History of Generated Poetics: cutups from Dickinson to Melitzah (Katie Rose Pipkin via medium.com)
• Who are the Audiences of Computer-Generated Novels? (dev.to)
• Internet Archaeology (Artists and Machine Intelligence via medium.com)
• Computer Generated Poetry Will Knock Your Socks Off (Yisela Alvarez Trentini via medium.com)
• So you want to build a generator… (galaxykate0.tumblr.com)
• When the Machine Made Art: Grant Taylor traces the origins of computational creativity (creativeapplications.net)
• The Strange Victorian Computer That Generated Latin Verse (atlasobscura.com)
• Your Bot Art Belongs in a Museum (secretcave.co)
• If an AI creates a work of art, who owns the rights to it? (qz.com)
• Computational Narrative Intelligence: Past, Present, and Future (Mark Riedl via medium.com)
• Technology Should Be In Service of Poetry (eyebeam.org)
• Artificial Intelligence and the Arts: Toward Computational Creativity (bbvaopenmind.com)
• Some Objections to Interactive Computer Art (flong.com)
• COCO’s Memory Palace: A Strange Fantasia (Lynn Cherny via medium.com)
• Better Living Through Generativity (rogueprocess.run)
• What it Means to Be an ‘Experimental Computer Poet’ (motherboard.vice.com)
• Voice Technology is an Opportunity to Make Weird Stuff (Nicole He via medium.com)
• Adventures in Narrated Reality – Artists and Machine Intelligence (Ross Goodwin via medium.com)
• Creativity and AI: Deep Neural Nets “Going Wild” (Roelof Pieters)
• Are Twitter bots the future of experimental literature? (Sam Sutherland via This Exists)
• Automating Creativity – How Artificial Intelligence changes Creative Processes (youtube.com)
• Stop Making Video Games, Make Bots Instead (George Buckenham)
• Darius Kazemi at Eyeo 2014: “A simple for loop can, in a few seconds, generate more information than a human being can consume in a lifetime. When we make art with code, we have to confront this fact. So how do you compose for infinity?”
• Can artificial intelligence create Art? (BBC Click via youtube.com)

Art and curation left in the hands of scripts and algorithms is fascinating …

The Art and Nonsense Poetry of Obscure Twitter Bots (secretcave.co)

asking “can a computer generate shakespeare?” to me is less interesting than asking e.g. “what would gertrude stein have made w/tensorflow?”

— Allison Parrish (@aparrish) May 5, 2017

“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.” ~Brian Eno / @dark_shark

— wavepaths (@wavepaths) November 16, 2017

the computer poet’s muse (1966) pic.twitter.com/VTshAOn0TU

— James Ryan (@xfoml) July 13, 2017

Misbehaving bots¶

• Bots Should Punch Up (crummy.com)
• Basic Twitter bot etiquette: Applies to all bots (Darius Kazemi)
• Bots Need to Learn Some Manners, and It’s on Us to Teach Them (wired.com)
• How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist (motherboard.vice.com)
• TayAndYou – toxic before human contact (smerity.com)
• Not just Tay: A recent history of the Internet’s racist bots (washingtonpost.com)
• Who’s Responsible When a Twitter Bot Sends a Threatening Tweet? (slate.com)
• So your AI bot went haywire, should you care? (Azeem Azhar via linkedin.com)
• What Good is a Bad Bot? (blog.howdy.ai)
• The Bot Rulebook (Amir Shevat via Slack Platform Blog)
• Where many bots will fail (blog.howdy.ai)
• Three Years of @fewerror (Will Thompson)
• This Bot Tweets Photos and Names of People Who Bought ‘Drugs’ on Venmo (motherboard.vice.com)

I spent 10 minutes discussing the #Ethics of #AI & #Robots with my 5 & 7 year old kids. They have produced their own #RobotRules! #ProudDad pic.twitter.com/gC1o8yRct5

— Rob McCargow (@robmccargow) March 20, 2017

Biased algorithms¶

• Collection of Machine Bias Articles (propublica.org)
• Digital Consequences (technologyreview.com)
• Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem (nytimes.com)
• Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming as biased as we are (thenextweb.com)
• Language necessarily contains human biases, and so will machines trained on language corpora (freedom-to-tinker.com)
• Chances are your Models are Racist, Sexist, or both (deliprao.com)
• The Veil of Ignorance (mrmrs.io)
• Mechanomorphs and the politeness of machines (nytlabs.com)
• Why An AI-Judged Beauty Contest Picked Nearly All White Winners (motherboard.vice.com)
• A.I. Doesn’t Get Black Twitter (inverse.com)
• There is a blind spot in AI research (nature.com)
• Deep-Fried Data (idlewords.com)
• The Real Bias Built In at Facebook (nytimes.com)
• Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features (theintercept.com)
• How to Fix Silicon Valley’s Sexist Algorithms (technologyreview.com)
• 5 unexpected sources of bias in artificial intelligence (techcrunch.com)
• How a Machine Learns Prejudice (scientificamerican.com)
• Attractive, slavish and at your command: Is AI sexist? (bbc.com)
• What Enron’s emails tell us about artificial intelligence (technical.ly)
• Algorithms might be everywhere, but like us, they’re deeply flawed (theconversation.com)
• Investigating the algorithms that govern our lives (cjr.org)
• “Programming and Prejudice: Can Computers Be Racist?” (Talks at Google) (youtube.com)
• Joy Buolamwini: How I’m fighting bias in algorithms (video, ted.com)
• Artificial intelligence: How to avoid racist algorithms (bbc.com)
• AI programs exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals (theguardian.com)
• A cautionary tale about humans creating biased AI models (techcrunch.com)
• How artificial intelligence learns to be racist (vox.com)
• The Guardian view on computers and language: reproducing bias (theguardian.com)
• Physiognomy’s New Clothes (Blaise Aguera y Arcas via medium.com)
• Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases (sciencemag.org)
• ‘A white mask worked better’: why algorithms are not colour blind (theguardian.com)
• The fight against racist algorithms (theoutline.com)
• To err is algorithm: Algorithmic fallibility and economic organisation (Juan Mateos-Garcia via medium.com)
• The Algorithmic Justice League (Joy Buolamwini via medium.com)
• Inspecting Algorithms for Bias (technologyreview.com)
• AI’s use in healthcare will only further perpetuate bias in medical data (qz.com)
• How to make a racist AI without really trying (Rob Speer via github.com)
• How can we stop algorithms telling lies? (theguardian.com)
• Chatbots and artificial intelligence bots are shedding outdated gender male and female stereotypes to go genderless — Quartz (qz.com)
• The Tech Take: The genderless face of accounting bots (accountingtoday.com)
• Google explains how artificial intelligence becomes biased against women and minorities (qz.com)
• The Foundations of Algorithmic Bias (approximatelycorrect.com)
• Copyright Law Makes Artificial Intelligence Bias Worse (motherboard.vice.com)
• We Are Running Out of Time to Make Algorithms Fair (nautil.us)
• Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment (Helen Hester)
• Tim Hwang on bots that cause chaos (oreilly.com)
• Kate Crawford: DARK DAYS: AI and the Rise of Fascism – SXSW 2017 (youtube.com)
• At the Intersection of AI, Governments, and Google (Tim Hwang via youtube.com)

“An algorithm is an opinion embedded in code.” – @WillNoel #darkarchives

— Dot Porter, Protagonist (@leoba) September 11, 2019

Algorithmic discrimination illustrated. Animated gif from my talk tomorrow at the Harvard Data Privacy lab https://t.co/Hh6lOpacdi pic.twitter.com/zTS4nhD6vk

— J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) April 7, 2017

Not a crisis: not everybody can code.

Actually a crisis: programmers don’t know ethics, history, sociology, psychology, or the law.

— Brian Mastenbrook (@bmastenbrook) October 31, 2016

@hondanhon AIs don’t kill people. Training data kills people.

— Martin Spindler ? (@mjays) October 20, 2016

Best outline of social / technical / contextual biases in computer systems I’ve seen yet. #EthicalAlgorithms (Friedman & Nissenbaum, 1996) pic.twitter.com/vdKNASz5Ro

— Paige Bailey (@DynamicWebPaige) October 3, 2016

Machines don’t need to think for us to fear them, only to operate beyond our immediate grasp of understanding.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) October 30, 2017

i saw this on an unrelated meme page so i think you’re penetrating the market pic.twitter.com/fwALZb8DwC

— Julianna 💊 #SQUIPTRIP @ NYC! (@Donteatacowman) February 5, 2019

Dangers in automation¶

• Data: “Algorithms are shit, basically.” (Philosophy Tube via youtube.com)
• ‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming for Your Job’—Management Is (gizmodo.com)
• Critical Algorithm Studies: a Reading List (socialmediacollective.org)
• The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI (technologyreview.com)
• The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities
• Why it’s dangerous to outsource our critical thinking to computers (theguardian.com)
• Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
• Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment (salvage.zone)
• Designing News Apps for Humanity (source.opennews.org)
• As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential (nytimes.com)
• The Pentagon’s “Terminator Conundrum: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own (nytimes.com)
• The darker side of machine learning (techcrunch.com)
• Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver (fastcoexist.com)
• Attacking machine learning with adversarial examples (openai.com)
• Machine Learning and Misinformation (paulsoulos.com)
• The Art Of Manipulating Algorithms (fastcodesign.com)
• Automate This! Delivering Resistance in the Gig Economy (metamute.org)
• Artificial intelligence is ripe for abuse, tech executive warns: ‘a fascist’s dream’ (theguardian.com)
• Accident Tourist: Driverless car crashes, ethics, machine learning (thesocietypages.org)
• AI Can Be Fooled With One Misspelled Word (motherboard.vice.com)
• The Ethics of Crash Optimisation Algorithms (philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.nl)
• Algorithmic accountability (techcrunch.com)
• Magic AI: these are the optical illusions that trick, fool, and flummox computers (theverge.com)
• Artificial Intelligence Owes You an Explanation (slate.com)
• Magic AI: these are the optical illusions that trick, fool, and flummox computers (theverge.com)
• A Blueprint for Coexistence with Artificial Intelligence (wired.com)
• Please Prove You’re Not a Robot (nytimes.com)
• AI Shouldn’t Believe Everything It Hears (technologyreview.com)
• Slight Street Sign Modifications Can Completely Fool Machine Learning Algorithms (spectrum.ieee.org)
• Hackers send silent commands to speech recognition systems with ultrasound (techcrunch.com)
• Would you want a robot to be your child’s best friend? (theguardian.com)
• Artificial intelligence discovers gayface. Sigh. (scatter.wordpress.com)
• Specification gaming examples in AI (Victoria Krakovna via docs.google.com)
• Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t. (nytimes.com)
• A Basic Lack of Understanding (notesfrombelow.org)
• The Real Moral Dilemma of Self-Driving Cars (OneZero via medium.com)
• Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm (nytimes.com)
• Algorithms Are Automating Fascism. Here’s How We Fight Back (vice.com)
• The Problem With AI Is the Problem With Capitalism (jacobin.com)

“Come dream along with me; the best is yet to be.” https://t.co/GHCWluG2tm pic.twitter.com/XGeVkqPCcn

— @DynamicWebPaige (@DynamicWebPaige) November 19, 2017

This program won at Tic-Tac-Toe by figuring out how to remotely crash its opponents’ computers, causing them to forfeit. pic.twitter.com/cNCUuHTluT

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) March 15, 2018

Robert Wilensky’s tongue-in-cheek history of early AI pic.twitter.com/pmtgoO11TN

— Mark J. Nelson (@mm_jj_nn) October 1, 2015

Using salt circle runes to trap an A.I. car is possibly the most cyberpunk thing ever. pic.twitter.com/4ckbQlMyBS

— Kasper Hawser (@Gossenphilosoph) July 11, 2017

Life of a (ro)bot¶

• What It’s Like to Be a Bot (reallifemag.com)
• Why Humans Love Robots Like People (thedailybeast.com)
• Bots and Gender (Veronica Belmont via medium.com)
• Virtual assistant bots like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana spend much of their time fending off sexual harassment (qz.com)
• Why Siri and Alexa Weren’t Built to Smack Down Harassment (wired.com)
• Humans ‘will bully robot cars’, Mercedes chief warns (telegraph.co.uk)
• We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment (qz.com)
• Why Amazon’s Alexa is a feminist (venturebeat.com)
• The truth about gender-neutral bots (Healthinar Engagement via medium.com)
• REPORT: 1 in 4 people have fantasised about Alexa, Siri, and other AI assistants
• Why People Treat Bots Like People (chatbotsmagazine.com)
• AI ‘victims’ of sexism answer back (raconteur.net)
• Tech Etiquette: The Real Reason You Need to be Polite to Alexa (Rafe Needleman via medium.com)
• Robot Tries to Escape from Children’s Abuse (youtube.com)
• What Interacting With Robots Might Reveal About Human Nature (theatlantic.com)
• Should you say “please” and “thank you” to your Amazon Echo or Google Home? (theverge.com)
• They welcomed a robot into their family, now they’re mourning its death (theverge.com)

“Lose your sense of entitlement and include AIs in your circle of empathy” Rich Sutton presented by @geordierose #mkt4intel pic.twitter.com/NCHQxQCeog

— David Crow (@davidcrow) October 27, 2016

Further reading¶

• Tech Ethics Curriculum (Casey Fiesler via Google Sheets)
• Conveying the Boundaries of Artificial Intelligence (Jess Johnson via medium.com)
• Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (nautil.us)
• How can we address real concerns over artificial intelligence? (theguardian.com)
• Can we open the black box of AI? (nature.com)
• An AI Pattern Language (datasociety.net, PDF)
• A Historical Lens For Machine Vision (thesocietypages.org)
• My friend, the bot (Jay Owens via medium.com)
• I Automated My Friends and Nobody Could Tell the Difference (latenightcoding.co)
• Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (idlewords.com)
• AI: Process v Output (Peter Bihr via medium.com)
• Eyes Without a Face (reallifemag.com)
• Togelius: Some advice for journalists writing about artificial intelligence (togelius.blogspot.se)
• Has human communication become botifed? (ibm.com)
• For 4 Seattle women called Alexa, it’s funny, frustrating to share name with Amazon device
• The Artificial Intelligence Revolution (waitbutwhy.com)

uh oh this google captcha… pic.twitter.com/bWh6StUR1v

— Tod E. Kurt (@todbot) September 11, 2017