Josie Young's Framework Introduction

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0:10 Skip to 0 minutes and 10 seconds I wrote the Feminist Chatbot Design Process in response to a couple of issues that I saw coming up in the AI and tech industry. It was 2016/2017 and the conversation around AI ethics, AI bias was really only just starting to happen. And in this context, I saw that there are a lot of people making a heap of chatbots at once, which is really exciting. And the underlying technology for chatbots is really cool, and natural language processing is really amazing, and, you know, there's a lot to be excited about. But, I recognised that it was an industry that wasn't ready to start thinking about the social impact of the design of these chatbots.

0:50 Skip to 0 minutes and 50 seconds And rather than, you know, thinking about the ways in which to encourage, you know, a whole industry of designers and developers to go and get, you know, ethics trainings or do PhDs in feminist impact studies - which would all be great, which they should totally do anyway - it was more about how can we design an intervention that people can bring into their day to day work. So at the point where they're being asked to put together a chatbot, have something ready in two weeks, you know, how can we provide support and an intervention there?

1:20 Skip to 1 minute and 20 seconds To we get them thinking more critically about their design choices, and thinking more critically about how their design choices could have a negative impact on things like, you know, gender equality, perpetuating gender stereotypes, all that stuff. But do it in a way that it's not meant to make people feel bad for what they're doing, but really to try and empower them to think differently, think more critically, and come up with a better, more interesting result for their design. The end!

1:50 Skip to 1 minute and 50 seconds The process can be used in a number of different contexts, and it's meant to be something that anyone can pick up at any time. You don't need to be specially trained in it. You don't need any special equipment to use it. You don't need a facilitator, you can facilitate it yourself. So it's really about, you know, the tool being available for whichever context needs it. And primarily I was thinking about a design and development team sitting in, say, an ad agency or in a big tech company and just thinking 'okay we've got to deliver this thing in four weeks and a product owner wants to see progress.'

2:26 Skip to 2 minutes and 26 seconds You know, thinking about, OK, this tool needs to be able to work in that context. And then hopefully it can also work in, say, a university environment where you have young people who want to experiment with this technology. Artists could make it, you know, work in to how they work, in using technology to communicate their art. So really, it's, you don't need to have any kind of training or qualification to pick it up and just have a go.

2:56 Skip to 2 minutes and 56 seconds Back in 2017 chatbots were being made in a particular way. There was a lot more manual training, I think, that was going on. They weren't the services like Amazon Lex and, you know, the Google platform as well. I mean, they existed, but they weren't as, sort of, widely adopted now as they are in chatbot production. And I think it was also this idea of conversation design as a 'thing' was still really emerging. And so the 2017 version of the Chatbot Process has those limitations within it. And since then, I think there is absolutely the growing focus on conversation design, and embedding feminist values in how you design the conversation of a chatbot. There's also questions around that architecture use.

3:41 Skip to 3 minutes and 41 seconds If you are going to use a platform like Amazon Lex. You know, how do you understand the impact of that choice of technology? So those are the two really key things that have come out. And I think more concerns around data privacy, and data sharing, as well has being really key.

This page links from [[Feminist goals when creating bots]], part of the [[Feminist Chatbot Main Page]].

For broader context, see the [[The Golem Project Overview]] or the [[Master Contents Page]]