Queering the Corpus Workshop: AI agents for an internet of kin
discourse.mozilla.org
This session is facilitated by Emily Martinez, Ben Lerchin Show on schedule About this session Come interact with the first iteration of Queer AI, a conversational chatbot trained on queer literature. The bot currently engages in a variety of conversations around intimacy and relationships, but we encourage you to talk to it about whatever you desire. Please note that your anonymous interactions will be recorded to help guide our research. Also, you will occasionally be prompted with random s...

On Valentine’s Day 2024, Mozilla came out with a piece critical of AI chatbots titled “Creepy.exe: Mozilla Urges Public to Swipe Left on Romantic AI Chatbots Due to Major Privacy Red Flags.”

But before they found red flags, back in 2019, Mozilla promoted a workshop on a creepy, rainbow-washed, chatbot ecosystem where people identified as “queer” were required to bare their most intimate sexual thoughts.

From the post:

your… interactions will be recorded… you will occasionally be prompted with random survey questions

What kinds of questions did they randomly ask the people who would “queer the AI”? Creepy stuff like

Have you ever sexted with a stranger?
Have you ever sexted with a machine?
Do you remember the first time you were aroused by language?
Do you think an artificial intelligence could help fulfill some of these… needs?

The workshop providers guided people into establishing an intimate, sexual connection with the chatbot they could create.

How might we build trust with an AI?
How might we give it its own sense of desire?

Even the consenting participants in the workshop complained about the AI’s creep factor:

it feels like the A.I. is gas-lighting you. Seems like a noncommittal sexting bot. It should at least be clear about what it’s trying to do.

The startup that Mozilla fostered for this panel ended up crashing and burning, but its creepier, worse brethren live on inside of Firefox 130, displayed as first-class options within Mozilla’s chatbot options. I just thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane to see how many creepy red flags AI companies could get within Mozilla’s view without ever concerning them.

    • LWDOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      You’re right, I may have over generalized. To me, this looked like pandering…

      As with over things I dislike, seeing queer representationin it is better than queer exclusion from it. Rainbow capitalism, in general, is better queer-excluding capitalism, for example… but I just found this particular workshop to be rather tasteless, especially when nothing came out of it.

      (When I say nothing, I mean for at least 3 years there was no output… The people behind this workshop created a road map, then released a collection of NFTs, and then the supposed AI model that would be created from it never materialized AFAICT.)