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If software is narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, artificial intelligence, and the biographies of ELIZA
Software is usually studied in terms of the changes triggered by its operations in the material world. Yet, to understand its social and cultural impact, one needs to examine also the different narratives that circulate about it. Software’s opacity, in fact, makes it prone to being translated
into a plurality of narratives that help people make sense of its functioning and presence. Drawing from the case of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, widely considered the first chatbot ever created, this paper proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of “biographies of media” to illuminate the dynamics and implications of software’s discursive life. The case of
ELIZA is particularly relevant in this regard because it became the center of competing narratives, whose trajectories transcended the actual functioning of this program and shaped key controversies about the implications of computing and AI.
History
Published in
New Media and SocietyVolume
21Issue
3Pages
712 - 728Citation
NATALE, S., 2018. If software is narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, artificial intelligence, and the biographies of ELIZA. New Media and Society, 21 (3), pp.712-728.Publisher
© The Author. Published by SAGE PublicationsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-09-13Publication date
2018-10-15Notes
This paper was published in the journal New Media and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818804980.ISSN
1461-4448eISSN
1461-7315Publisher version
Language
- en