Witting & Unwitting Fantasies

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: AI and Changing Social Norms

Abstract

People have a wide variety of beliefs about AI chatbots. This paper leverages a comparison between two highly skilled communities of people building and using chatbots: engineers working on a commercial chatbot, Claude, and hobbyists building chatbots for sexual use on their own computers. Both groups are highly knowledgeable, building the same technology, an using it for the same purpose (roleplaying social interactions). Surprisingly, however, the hobbyists developing AI girlfriends are far less likely to anthropomorphize the technology than the corporate engineers building a mass market product. Using a technographic approach that combines analysis of how people talk about the technology with analysis of how the technology works and presents itself to those people, I argue that these two groups have developed distinct cultures of use that lead to sharply divergent views on what the chatbots are. While both groups are building machines to bring their fantasies to life, the diversity of sexual fantasies and personal computer hardware drives hobbyists to see chatbots as DIY projects composed and recomposed by mixing and matching independent parts. Anthropic employees’ comparatively unified fantasy and computing infrastructure, in contrast, obscure key workings of the technology even from the engineers in the process of building it. This contributes to the emerging literatures on attitudes about AI and the ways AI is changing sex tech. More fundamentally, it extends the theory of technology as an institution to demonstrate how cultural and technical forces can come together to make it invisible during its production, not only to users far removed in time and space.

Author

• Jeffrey W. lockhart, University of California, Berkeley