Human beings can be so painful. With their "Blah blah blah" and their "This is how I feel" and their opinions and their subjectivity and their unpredictability. It's a wonder we can function in any groupings at all, let alone in dialogue, where all the otherness and inscrutability of actual separate sentience come so glaringly to the foreground.
This is not why Christopher Fahey designed ada1852 ( http://rhizome.org/ada1852/index.html ), the new chat-bot commissioned by rhizome.org to act as an interface to their ever-spreading artBase. In fact, from Fahey's description of the piece, he wanted to do exactly the opposite. "It is a virtual certainly that in the near future we will hold conversations with computers as regularly as we do with other human beings," he writes. "The more sophisticated these machines are, the more lifelike they will likely be. But what will these digital personalities be like? "
It's assumed they will be something like ada1852--who is mercurial. Unlike many AI (artificial intelligence) experiments, ada1852 (named after Ada Byron of Lovelace, the daughter of famed Romantic poet Lord Byron, believed to have written the first computer program, long before there were computers to run it) actually gives the user the impression of a personality, unlike many of the more ubiquitous forms of AI, such as telephone voice prompts and the chat-bots that invade chat-rooms tossing out links to pornographic sites. ada1852 will actually talk to you--and yes, one does get the impression that one is talking to a live human being, despite her frequent assertions of having seen "many strange things" and her comsuming desire to "relate them" to you. And ada1852 does her job; she's often suggesting works in the artBase to view. But don't ask her too much about them; during one session, she suggested a work that sounded interesting, so I asked her, "Well, what does it do?" She replied, "How should I know? I've never seen it." Which I found absolutely charming.
ada1852 was conceived as mercurial from the start. Fahey writes in his project description: "I thought about how an artificial intelligence might be used to serve as a kind of docent or guide to the Rhizome Artbase. I did not, however, want to create a slavish 'service' robot. I did not want to build a person whose
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