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Samuel Woolley’s “How to Think About Bots” provides fodder for important ethical conversations around culpability and digital autonomy, but also for philosophical conversations around authorship and art. I was vaguely aware that bots routinely produce articles and writing, but I always thought it would be easy to distinguish such articles as “bot writing.” But when I took the New York Times quiz that Woolley cites, “Did a Computer or a Human Write This?”, I earned a devastating 3/8 (apparently better than 8% of players). All this is to say that bots are incredibly successful at reproducing patterns of human writing and discourse. It really makes me wonder why I have spent my college education programming my brain with the rules of Strunk and White, agonizing over word choice and split infinitives, when a bot can produce similar-quality writing at a much faster pace.
Indeed, even the kind of carefully crafted speech called for in response to a tragedy may be predicted and replicated by a bot. My friend and fellow Davidson student Arianna Montero-Colbert created a bot that generates institutional responses to tragedies—you know, the kind of campus-wide email we get from CQ after a devastating shooting or police killing that makes vague calls for “unity” and “dignity” rather than any kind of coherent political action. Arianna’s bot is scary good at imitating those detached, performative responses, and the results are chilling . We might consider tragedies as occasions that call for some novel or groundbreaking commentary, but Tragedy Bot shows us that even CQ’s eloquent prose adheres to discursive patterns, tropes, and clichés that can be replicated by a bot.
Posted from Digital Studies by Hannah L.