Public Scholarship: Preparing Communication Studies for Artificial Intelligence

I wrote “Bring on the Bots? Public Scholarship: Preparing Communication Studies for Artificial Intelligence” as the lead feature for the May-June 2023 issue of Spectra, the National Communication Association’s online magazine.

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a paper that introduced his chatbot ELIZA, a computer program that made “certain kinds of natural language conversation between man [sic] and computer possible.” In the paper, he writes about a chatbot, a program that allows a human user to have a seemingly natural conversation with a computer program. Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot imitates a Rogerian psychotherapist who puts the burden of the conversation primarily on the client by prompting them to share more and expand on their experience, as shown above. ELIZA is considered one of the first chatbots ever made, and its convincing dialogue sparked the term “ELIZA Effect” to describe how users anthropomorphize conversational machines.  

Like Weizenbaum, I have created a bot. Mine, @RhetoricTweeter, is a Twitter bot that produces a hypothetical thesis for rhetorical criticism once per day, e.g., “In my next paper, I will use decolonial theory to uncover that Gay Instagram Memes cultivated the critic. #TeamRhetoric.” Created in my first year of graduate school, I was experimenting with a more productive use of automation than popular examples of election-meddling and anti-vaccine bots. @RhetoricTweeter joined a legion of “good bots”—like Protest Bots and Art Bots—on Twitter that have since been largely killed off under Elon Musk’s ownership.  

After creating @RhetoricTweeter, I hosted a “Deliberative Bots” workshop in 2019 during a department colloquium at the University of Maryland, College Park. My colleagues and I created and published our own Twitter bot, and I attempted to demonstrate why experimenting with bots and automation—when there were plenty of humans to engage with!—might be worth their time. In the last nine months or so, those of us who are studying artificial intelligence (AI) and communication have rarely needed to explain the relevance of our research. That’s because one chatbot has fundamentally reshaped our cultural conversations: ChatGPT.  

You can read more on NCA’s Spectra.