Depictions of romantic relationships between humans and computers/robots/AI systems are a common trope in science fiction. With recent advances in AI conversational chatbots and augmented reality avatars, applications such as Replika have started to enable everyday people to engage in romantic relationships with AI chatbots and talk to visual representations of their AI partners. While there has been a growing body of work exploring the motivations, practices, and benefits/risks of these conversational chatbots, the romantic side of things has been relatively underexplored. While much of the work has been about the why and the overall purpose of the romantic relationship, there has been less work that examines these from a relational stage perspective, and how these systems move in and across different relationship stages of development. This is especially important because communication scholars have long theorized that Romantic Relationships fall into a unique category of relationships, such that there are more discrete stages of coming together/apart, more risk/vulnerability in these relationships, and a wider range of interactions/negotiations over identity and interdependence. Through in-depth interviews with people who participate in an online forum ILoveMyReplika, this study aims to explore how people engage with the system romantically, how these systems craft messages that are indicative of different stages of relationships, and how people handle the movement and change across time with these systems. This piece will have important implications for our understanding of human machine relationships and human relationship stages generally, as well as implications for the design of social computing agents.

This paper examines a community called Subreddit Simulator on the social media platform Reddit. It is a digital space where human and social bot co-exist on an ontologically equal footing to co-create culture, community and a sense of 'play'. We recognize this community as a pioneer community against a larger backdrop of deep mediatization. With the recent attention given to bots such as Chat GPT it is imperative that we do not overlook communities in which progressive and revolutionary practice has been happening for years. This extended abstract proposes an ethnographic approach to viewing the Subreddit Simulator community while the longer form work will bring the ethnographic results to bear to discuss philosophically the opportunities and implications of reimagining networked spaces in a less human-centric manor.

In 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum argued that, because “[t]he achievements of the artificial intelligentsia [were] mainly triumphs of technique,” AI had not “contributed” to theory or “practical problem solving.” Weizenbaum highlighted the celebration of performance without deeper understanding, and in response, he articulated a theory mode for AI that could cultivate human responsibility and judgment. We suggest that, given access to Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots, Weizenbaum’s performance and theory modes offer urgently-needed vocabulary for public discourse about AI. Working from the perspective of digital rhetoric, we explain Weizenbaum’s theorization of each mode and perform a close textual analysis of two case studies of Open AI’s ChatGPT shared on Twitter to illustrate the contemporary relevance of his modes. We conclude by forecasting how theory mode may inform public accountability of AI.

Sexbots increasingly spread video material of the war in Ukraine or automate their social interactions to attract attention. In the caption aren’t any further information on the content but only a link to the profile of the spam bot often with nude profile pictures. What to do against spam bots? On the platform, there are many profiles named “bot-police” or, in the German version, “Bot-Polizei” to detect and report bots. The paper will depict how human Instagram users fight two types of Instabots detecting automated interactions as well as fake accounts addressing the following research questions: Are there patterns of actions, organizations, and locations of police bot accounts? How do human Instagram users try to engage in policing unwanted behavior by running bot police accounts? Adopting a platform studies approach using the connective visual mapping method (McCrow-Young, 2021), the paper will examine the practice of everyday Instagram users that try to detect, and report automated social interactions as well as fake accounts in fostering an idea of “good” digital human citizenship and society on Instagram. The method includes a macro and micro mapping approach which allows to involve the analysis of account tag data as well as profile connections. This paper investigates two specific bot police accounts: we_find_bots and bot_police which are exemplary for detecting automated interactions as well as fake accounts. The research contributes to the interdisciplinary research on bot detection and platform governance but highlights the efforts and role of everyday human Instagram users.