ENTERTAINING AGENTS: A SOCIOLOGICAL CASE STUDY

Traditional AI has not concerned itself extensively with sociology nor with what emotional reactions might be produced in its users. On the other hand, entertainment is very concerned indeed with these issues. AI and ALife programs which are to be used in entertainment must therefore be viewed both as AI/ALife endeavors and as psychological and sociological endeavors. This paper presents a brief description of Julia [Mauldin 94], an implemented software agent, and then examines the sociology of those who encounter her, using both transcripts of interactions with Julia, and direct interviews with users. Julia is designed to pass as human in restricted environments while being both entertaining and informative, and often elicits surprisingly intense emotional reactions in those who encounter her. An introduction to MUDs and Julia Julia [Mauldin 94] is a MUD [Curtis 92] [Bruckman 93] [Evard 93] robot. A MUD is a text-only, multiperson, virtual reality. [Mauldin 94], while describing Julia’s internal structure, gives very little ‘feel ’ for what it like to interact with her outside of the strictures of a formal Turing test; hence, transcripts of many interactions with her appear below as examples. (Since Julia adamantly insists that she is female, I refer to the program here as ‘she’.)

1. Robot - A robot (also called a droid) is a machine - especially one programmable by a computer - capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.

2. Turing Test - The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

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