Lucy Grey: Gendernaut

I was Just Struck by an Interesting Idea

You all know how cleverbot works, right? It’s a chat bot that utilizes user input as material for chats. It “learns” appropriate responses based on user interactions well enough to fool a human being into thinking another human being is on the other end of the conversation. In a sense, another human being is on the other end, just not in real time.

ANYWAY. What if we had a clone of cleverbot that was seeded with knowledgeable, polite, friendly responses to many questions encountered in social justice issues? My main motivation on this is to have a friendly, patient resource to help educate well-meaning yet clueless cis people about trans* people. The chat bot shouldn’t be limited to just trans* knowledge; there are a lot of overlaps and intersections that would need to be addressed. I’m just using the cis/trans* situation as an example.

This resource is attractive in a number of ways: 

  • As a bot, it could have infinite patience (or not, depending on how ‘tolerant’ of abusive language we make it)
  • While perhaps not quite as versatile or capable as a real human being holding a real time conversation with another human being, this could be a resource for those of us who simply don’t have the mental energy to engage in more education on this or that issue. It can be provided as a sort of final “Educate yourself! [link to sjbot]” retort.
  • A chat bot is a more interactive education method than simply throwing links or articles at people. And while it could provide articles and links upon request, the bot should also engage on a more personal, conversational level.
  • As a bot, it can handle multiple simultaneous conversations in a way that a single person cannot.
  • We could take advantage of our social justice communities’ combined knowledge and build a knowledge/conversation base that the bot uses as material for its conversations with others. We could continue to build and shape responses from the inside in a manner that’s disconnected from the urgency of a real-time conversation.
  • As a bot, we can record how its conversations go, analyze them, and improve our methods for engaging with outsiders. This bot could be used as a sort of research tool in understanding how people discuss and learn about social justice issues.

This is just an idea right now, and as simple as writing a chat bot may seem to be, I harbor no illusions that this will quickly grow into a monstrous task. Even still, it’s something that’s kidnapped my imagination, and I want to know what my friends on tumblr and twitter have to say.

Do you care to weigh in? Please, reblog with your comments!

3 months ago29 notes
  1. ravenbara reblogged this from cctcd
  2. pointytilly said: I have the programming skills of a brick, but this is a cool idea!
  3. smirkingbenevolence reblogged this from cctcd and added:
    awesome idea. Is CleverBot opensource?
  4. aerynotn said: I have little knowledge of cleverbot but is it open source? Could you just peel off a new bot and provide your own clever? I like this idea a lot anyway but yeah, HUGE task.
  5. animehrmine reblogged this from world-of-whit
  6. world-of-whit reblogged this from cctcd and added:
    I’ll offer assistance
  7. saathi1013 said: LOVE IT.
  8. epikoinos reblogged this from cctcd
  9. cctcd posted this