PHILIP AUSLANDER
Live from Cyberspace,
or, I was sitting at my computer this guy appeared he thought I was a bot

1. Digital technologies have reopened fundamental questions related to performance, especially that of "liveness." A new technology has created a new crisis that may lead to a different understanding of liveness. To bring the digital dispensation into focus, I will concentrate on the phenomenon of Internet "chatterbots."

2. Chatterbots typically operate in text-based digital environments, in which the user types messages to the bot and the bot responds in "typed" words that appear on the user's computer screen. The first and still best-known chatterbot is Eliza, the program that interrogates the user in the manner of a Rogerian psychotherapist, developed at MIT in 1966. Chatterbots are based on research in natural language processing and are generally programmed to recognize words and word patterns and to respond with statements that make sense in the context of what is said to them, though some are also capable of initiating conversations. The more sophisticated the programming, the more similar to human discourse the bot's conversation will be. Since Eliza, many other chatterbots have been created, including the well-known Julia, developed around 1990.

3. It is now possible to be engaged in conversation with a chatterbot without knowing it. Chatterbots can and do participate in online chatrooms and e-mail lists without necessarily being identified as bots. Online, the source of chatterbot conversation becomes ambiguous. In an Internet chatroom or on an e-mail list, it can be impossible to know whether you are conversing with a human being or a piece of software. This ambiguity results in part from the sensory limitations of the medium. Since we can neither see nor hear the sources of online chat, chatterbots can be and are mistaken for human chatters, and vice-versa. The existence of chatterbots reopens and reframes the question of liveness at a fundamental level. The ambiguity created by chatterbots can be contrasted with the ambiguity created by an older technology of limited sensory address, radio.While it is true that you can't know whether sounds you hear on the radio are produced live in the broadcast studio or recorded, you generally can have confidence in the ultimate source of the performance you hear. That is, even if you're listening to a recording, there is usually little doubt that it is a recording of a performance by a human being. The ambiguity created by radio has to do with the ontology of the performance (live or recorded), not with the ontological status of the performer (human or non-human). The chatterbot forces the discussion of liveness to be reframed as a discussion of the ontology of the performer rather than that of the performance.

(cont'd)