Bot Like Me

As more humans turn to apps and websites to find relationships, a growing non-human presence is rising to meet them. The “Bot Like Me” symposium explores the dangers, possibilities, and transformations emerging from this new frontier of human-chatbot relationships.

The swissnex Gallery’s exhibition Desperate times call for desperate measures, lol by !Mediengruppe Bitnik personifies gigabytes of chatbot script data from the hack of adult website Ashley Madison. The hack of the dating website revealed that virtually no human women were present, and that 75,000 female chatbots were created to fuel the illusion of casual sex opportunities to millions of high paying men subscribers.

The artists rebuild 51 San Francisco fem bots for the swissnex gallery to explore these human-bot relationships. Does it matter that users are chatting with bots and not humans? Why? How did the system work? How was trust built into it? Were these relationships ‘fake’ or ‘real’?

Urgent to ask these questions during a time where we have more and more smart machines around us, more bots than humans on the web, virtual assistants in our homes, bedrooms and pockets. We invite researchers, technologist, artists and writers to share with us their perspective on the growing intimacy and emotional relationship with the algorithms around us.