Cassandra
| Cassandra | |
|---|---|
| Creator | Lucia Dossin |
| Year | 2015 |
| Bio | Lucia Dossin (BR/NL) has a background in architecture and webdesign. She works at the intersection of art and design, currently focusing on the interactions between humans and computers and their implications in subjectivity, language and politics. |
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| Website | http://www.example.com |
Mina is a voice-operated chatterbot, a commercial project designed to fulfill humans' need of talking to someone else, in a world where communication has become almost completely mediated by social media services and the spoken word has given place to images and short text messages. The project is an interactive installation comprising 2 computers, which allows the exhibition visitor to talk with the bot.
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In a future not so far away, most humans are deprived from communicating with other humans through voice. Increased intolerance to raw subjective matters combined to a competitive labour market forcing every adult to work 12 to 16 hours every day resulted in most of human communication happening through written text messages or images using social media services. As a side effect, the complexity of human conversation decreases to a level in which machines and humans can understand each other reasonably well (an issue of Artificial Intelligence solved in an unexpectedly simple way, after many decades and much money spent on Natural Language research). Children are trained from early age to perform well in this environment. However, a parcel of the population still has the need to engage in conversation using their voices. Within this group, a few actually meet other humans to talk. Others do not manage to find time or energy, despite their longings. Aiming at this target group, a promising startup company designed Mina, a chatterbot that manages to fulfill this need for voice interaction remarkably well. Marketed as high technology, as a product of years of research done by the brightest minds in the tech world, Mina is in fact a very old program, written in the infancy of digital electronic computing. Interaction with Mina is possible through a monthly subscription fee.
Mina manages natural language in a quite rudimentary fashion. When the program is initiated, it loads a script. This script contains a specific set of instructions for a conversation. It is able to identify some language patterns and according to these patterns, it chooses a response that will sound plausible. But in order for the program to have the desired effect, the responses in these scripts have to be changed on a regular basis. These changes will help keep alive the illusion of talking to another human being. Without them, subscribers would probably notice they are talking to a robot and would cancel their subscriptions. Also, scripts are changed according to the calendar and the news - and can count on social media profile data to increase the (sanitized) subjectivity rate of the conversation.
From time to time, the words database used to feed the scripts is attacked and the connections between words are switched or corrupted. That causes the script to reply using weird language constructs, and in many cases Mina's talk will not only unmask the robot but can also ignite a self-reflection process in the subscriber. Some subscribers use this wake-up chance to try to find a way of having actual voice-based human contact back in their lives, others instead sue the company and ask the subscription fee back. Nobody never found out if the ones responsible for these attacks are hackers or a business competitor.