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Artificial intelligence as a discursive practice: the case of embodied software agent systems

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Abstract

In this paper, I explore some of the ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is mediated discursively. I assume that AI is informed by an “ancestral dream” to reproduce nature by artificial means. This dream drives the production of “cyborg discourse”, which hinges on the belief that human nature (especially intelligence) can be reduced to symbol manipulation and hence replicated in a machine. Cyborg discourse, I suggest, produces AI systems by rhetorical means; it does not merely describe AI systems or reflect a set of prevailing attitudes about technology. To support this argument, I analyse a set of research articles about an “embodied conversational agent” called the Real Estate Agent (REA). The articles about REA mobilise a set of rhetorical strategies that systematically downplay the system’s artificiality and bolster its humanlike qualities. Within the context of the dream of AI to produce humanlike machines, and given our strong bias for human-human interaction, the designers’ claim to REA’s humanness in their research articles, as I argue in the final section of this paper, needs little justification.

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Notes

  1. This metaphor does not guarantee that all computer systems will be interpreted as humanlike. Rather, the point here is simply that cyborg discourse is grounded on the potential identity of humans and machines. While it might be more precise, later in this paper, to rewrite this metaphor as A Software Agent is A Human, it is in fact my contention that cyborg discourse contributes to the blurring of the boundary between humans and machines, and thus opens up an interpretive space in which it makes sense (or at least it does not seem so bizarre) to speak of humanlike computers.

  2. I have appropriated Hayles’ (1999) language here with the exception of one important substitution. Hayles (1999) suggests, as a way to explain the concept of reflexivity, that the US Constitution “is shown to produce the very people whose existence it presupposes.” The text of the Constitution does not so much describe the “people” as bring them into being in the very act of labelling/describing them. “Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates”.

  3. While the GNL group has written at least seventeen papers about REA to date, two of these papers were not counted in my sample because they are basically identical to two other papers in my sample. All of GNL’s most recent publications and conference papers are available online. Page references in the text refer to page numbers in the electronic copies of GNL articles, not to page numbers in the journals and proceedings where some of the articles have been published. Download articles from http://web.media.mit.edu/~justine/publications.html and http://gn.www.media.mit.edu/groups/gn/publications.html.

  4. I often use “Cassell et al.” as shorthand for all of the members of the “Gesture and Narrative Language” group, even when a specific article I am citing has not been first-authored by Cassell. I do this because I am assuming that Cassell is the driving force of the group—GNL is her group after all—and she thus plays a critical role in all the group’s publications, even in rare cases where a GNL publication is not first-authored or single-authored by Cassell.

  5. Excerpts are shown here as they originally appeared in the sources: no changes to spelling, punctuation, or grammar have been made.

  6. In “Human Conversation as a System Framework,” Cassell et al. (2000a) cite Dehn and van Mulken in their references as “forthcoming.” It is difficult to say, however, just how many GNL articles in my sample had been published or presented prior to the availability among GNL group members of Dehn and van Mulken’s review. A conservative estimate would put the number in my sample at 12, since the remaining 3 of 15 articles were published in the fall of 1999, which is when GNL group members would have first read the Dehn and van Mulken review but not necessarily before they wrote the three 1999 articles in my sample.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of AI & Society for providing valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants at the 2002 Humanities and Technology Association conference in Terre Haute, Indiana, where another version of this paper was presented. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Justine Cassell, director of the Gesture and Narrative Language group at MIT’s Media Lab, for graciously allowing me to use the images of REA that appear in this paper.

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  1. Department of English, Technical Communication & Rhetoric Program, Texas Tech University, Box 43091, Lubbock, TX, 79409-3091, USA

    Sean Zdenek

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Zdenek, S. Artificial intelligence as a discursive practice: the case of embodied software agent systems. AI & Soc 17, 340–363 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-003-0284-8

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