Harriet Gillies: TayBot and this predictive text is actually generated and teaching itself to be better, based of what we are actually saying. So we're saying that these robots or these technologies aren't good enough, but they are literally being made by our collective voices and what we think and feel and want and do.

Oscar Schwartz: The more time that I've spent thinking about these types of technologies, the more paranoid I've become basically.

Izzy: Welcome. I'm Izzy Roberts-Orr, artistic director of the Emerging Writers' Festival and you're listening to the Digital Writers' Festival podcast. The Digital Writers' Festival 2018 is an online festival exploring the unique relationship between technology and storytelling, accessible anywhere, anytime by anyone with an internet connection. Join us right here in hyperspace between the 30th of October and the 3rd of November, and find our full program at digitalwritersfestival.com. Come in, get comfortable and get curious, as we hear from storytellers and artists from across the world wide web.

Oscar Schwartz: If speaking to machines was once a futuristic prospect, we now live in a world where it has become totally normal. We speak to machines when we check out at the supermarket, we speak to machines when we use virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa, and we speak to machines online when booking tickets, paying bills, complaining about customer service. The conversations we have with these machines are mostly constrained by types of service-like relationship. We ask them for help and they dutifully respond. This means that our conversations are usually functional, banal or even boring. But what might be the creative possibilities of machine language as speaking machines become more commonplace, when new forms of expression open up? Will our computers be able to say things that were previously unsayable? Welcome to the Digital Writers' Festival podcast. I'm Oscar Schwartz, a writer and researcher currently based in New York. Today, I'm joined by Harriet Gillies, a Sydney-based performance artist, who among many other things, recently directed a play whose script was written with predictive text software. Hi, Harriet.

Harriet Gillies: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Oscar Schwartz: So, I'd love to begin by acknowledging that here in New York where I am, I'm on the traditional lands of Lenape people.

Harriet Gillies: Yes. And I am on the Kaniyen-Kahaka Nations land in Montreal, but Montreal is also historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations people of Canada, but originally, I am from Sydney. The Gadigal Clan of the Eora Nation is the land where I'm from.

Oscar Schwartz: Thanks Harriet. So, the idea of machine speech is nothing new. Rene Descartes was thinking about talking about automatons in the 17th century, and now Alan Turing basically ushered in the digital age by imagining what it might be like to talk to a human-like computer. But the availability and accessibility of language

generators today is letting artists and writers like yourself experiment with machine text and speech in fascinating new ways. Harriet, earlier this year you directed a play called The Lifestyle of the Richard and Family that used predictive text. Can you tell me a bit about the play and writing process behind it?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, so Lifestyle of the Richard and Family was a project that was presented at Next Wave Festival this year in Melbourne, in partnership with Melbourne Knowledge Week. And the text was developed by the writer Roslyn Helper through a series of text messages, where she used predictive text software called Swiftkey Note, and texted herself using only one of three options given to her as the next possible word that she would like to say in a sentence. And from there, we took a huge chunk of data, and looked at it, and explored what patterns were emerging, what surprises were emerging, what things that we were expecting happened or didn't happen, and then structured or edited the text into what became the show, which was two halves. One was one realistic drama episode, where we made this nonsensical language come alive in a very dramatic and formal performance structure, and then in the second half we let the language run a bit more wild, as if it was data jumping around wherever the Internet is.

Oscar Schwartz: Interesting. And how is it performed?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, so we did a development halfway through the process where we got six amazing performers together, and they took to performing the text in two different ways. In one way, we tried to make sense of it, and tried to humanize it, and explore the idea that this was a human conversation, this text. And in the other one we kind of gave it more of the significance of poetry, and treated the words with more heavy weight, less conversational psychology, more of a virtuosic kind of lens. And we got two really different performance styles that both said really interesting things, so kind of just meshed the two together and put them both in the show.

Oscar Schwartz: Did you act in the play as well?

Harriet Gillies: I performed in the second half as a weird, cyber, reflective siren, and essentially wore a silver gimp suit head to toe that had a mermaid tail, and dragged myself across the stage, and got to the front of the stage, and sung a song about being lonely while the rest of the cast in the background were using this mirror material called mylar to project the screen with all the text that was written by the predictive text software across the room, and they were kind of shadowing the text into a mirror ball.

Oscar Schwartz: Oh, my God, that sounds totally amazing. I wish I could've seen it.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, it was fun. Well, hopefully the world tour is just around the corner. Yet to be confirmed.

Oscar Schwartz: So the song that you were singing at that suit at the front of the stage, was that also predictive text?

Harriet Gillies: No, that was just a mash-up. That was a Hank Williams song, who's like an old country music singer-songwriter. But we took the approach of structure the second half, the kind of more explosive Internet styled half, as the form of the Internet. So one thing that we were really interested in exploring in this show, and something I'm really interested in exploring as an artist, is the way that the actual form is, of the Internet, and AI, and these kind of technological advances are changing our way of approaching meaning-making. So the second half was kind of what it feels like to search the web. So we'd copy and paste things, and drag things, like we dragged JPGs on and off the Internet to our desktop. We tried to kind of create this visual mural or collage of what it feels like to be on the Internet.

Oscar Schwartz: Wow. Interesting that you mention meaning making, because I imagine the role of director often is to help an actor realize a character or realize the personality in certain lines. How did you go about this when a lot of the language in the play was actually emerging from a computational agent?

Harriet Gillies: Well, Oscar, you'll probably have plenty to say on this, too. The most remarkable thing about the process is that it's absolutely not hard at all. It's incredibly easy. They're very human-sounding words. And it's amazing how brilliant the human species is at being able to find meaning in sometimes absurd or kind of smashed together sentences. We have this incredible ability to kind of distill the meaning and compute at a lightning speed before we even have had the chance to realize that it kind of didn't even make sense. So it was actually really hilarious that in rehearsals it was so rare that we were having a conversation about what this line meant. And this is to the credit for the amazing people that I worked with, the performers, that realized the text. But there was no question, because the computers sound exactly like us, like they've been listening. They've been taking our data, they know how we talk and now they talk just like that, and it's kind of hilarious, and we laugh our whole way through these amazingly profound and stupid at once sentences, but then it's kind of shocking. Yeah, they really can speak quite well, don't you think?

Oscar Schwartz: Sometimes. I think it depends on what type of conversation you want to have. If you want to have one that is purely discursive and makes sense in a purely serviceable type of light, and sometimes they can be kind of frustrating when Siri doesn't understand you, but if you're open the more poetic resonances, I think, yeah, definitely it can be very compelling.

Harriet Gillies: I suppose one of the things I'm interested in is trying to really listen to, what is technology saying, as if they were a person and actually trying to listen to what they're trying to tell us. And yeah, sometimes it can be interesting. Like in this show that we made, the apocalypse kept on getting mentioned. And I said to

Roslyn, like, "How many times have you talked about the apocalypse? Why does this keep coming up? Is it in your cookies or something?" And she was like, "Harriet, I have no idea why the apocalypse is mentioned so much by this predictive text." So yeah, sometimes I'm sure we're imbuing far more meaning into that, but that's also part of the beautiful artistic experience of kind of understanding this data.

Oscar Schwartz: Totally. Kind of creepy. So a lot of the conversation with machines, and particularly like predictive text, it happens via text on the screen. As a performance, how did you bring this to life in a more physical space?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I guess the short answer is both. We played with the significance of the spoken word versus the written word, and also the different parts of the brain that are taking in the information when it's written versus when it's spoken to us. So that was something that we were interested in playing with, and there is a sense of humor that the written word can capture with predictive text that we've become really used to one things like Reddit and meme culture that actually has a sense of humor that can't be realized through the spoken word so well. It really works as a written thing rather than a spoken thing.

Oscar Schwartz: Yeah.

Harriet Gillies: So that's something I've started being quite interested in, the idea that the medium is the message, the actual form of the way that the information is given to you is part of it. So yeah, different ways I guess.

Oscar Schwartz: Sometimes, a reaction that I see, when kind of natural language processing or predictive text is used, in artworks or plays or poetry, or whatever it is, is people's knee jerk reaction is kind of, this is just another case of automation, of humans being replaced in some form of labor. How did you come to terms with that, with creative agency while you were making this play?

Harriet Gillies: Oh, my God, Oscar, that's such a good question. I've been thinking about this so much recently. Yeah, so what does ... I suppose if technology is going to take the place of so many of us, in fact almost all of us within the next generation, such a high percentage of jobs that we have relied on as keeping us alive are going to be made absolutely redundant by technology, and we're not going to ... People aren't going to be needed to fight wars, and they're not going to be needed to make things in factories because it's all going to be replaced by robots. So what do we do? And that's an interesting question, and I feel like civilization is still stuck in an old model of trying to figure it out.

Harriet Gillies: I think, however, it's interesting to think about this idea that I read in Yuval Harari's book, Homo Deus, which is the Great Decoupling, and that's the technology advancement of the decoupling between intelligence and consciousness, and now on earth we have consciousness with intelligence, but

for the first time we have something that is intelligent but isn't conscious. So I suppose what humans are going to need to do is figure out how to make our consciousness more important than the intelligence of machines. And as an artist, I think art is going to be really instrumental in that shift, and Susan Sontag has an amazing quote that I think of often, which is, to put it very generally, art and art-making is a form of consciousness. The materials of art are the variety of forms of consciousness.

Harriet Gillies: And one of the tasks art is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness and reporting back what's there. So I suppose, I think that art can be the tool that allows humans to think about what we have that is past this function that we've sort of relied upon before, but is going to be replaced by artificial intelligence.

Oscar Schwartz: Being like it will perhaps, in a certain sense, fill an existential void as the jobs kind of go the way of the robots?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, and I suppose it will make us reassess more at a wider social level how we ascribe value in society, and is it based on what you're worth, or is it based on a purpose you have in life?

Oscar Schwartz: What reaction did you get to this play, and the fact that you used predictive text? Were people outraged, did they think it was funny?

Harriet Gillies: People thought it was really funny, and I think there's a really nice game that you get to play, and I'm sure you'd know about this with ... And even we play it on our phones at home with Siri, where we like to trick the technology, and we like to think that we're more clever than technology, so we tell Siri to say stupid things or in the instance of this show, some people, once they figured out what was going on, really enjoyed laughing at the silliness of the algorithm coming up with this kind of nonsense. So there was that kind of experience. My favorite thing that someone said was, "I have no idea what just happened, but I really had fun." That for me was very good. A lot of people-

Oscar Schwartz: That sounds like everyday for me.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, exactly. That's the way we're going. And other people find it intimidating. A lot of people have genuine concerns and worries about technology. One of the many boilings points, it seems to be overboiling at the moment in our world, but there is a lot of very serious threats in a lot of instances where losing ground in making ethical decisions around the Internet. So some people, when that level of the show hits them, can be quite confronted, as I think we all can be.

Oscar Schwartz: So it does bring out that kind of existential thinking about what our purpose is that the show kind of went there?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah. And I think another thing it confronted me with, I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest the audience walked away with such a deep and profound experience, because I kind of sat with this for three years as opposed to 90 minutes, but I suppose also a lot of it, to me, starts to reflect on the futility of language and this idea of narrative being this thing that was really important because it is the way that humans coordinate and mass-coordination is what made humans evolve into such a sophisticated species, but also narrative is actually, maybe, all lies, and all propaganda of different kinds, and there isn't an objective truth. And I think we all kind of deep down know that a little bit, or that can sit with us at a level, but then when we see something like a random algorithm being able to make something beautiful that makes us feel beautiful, it can kind of prod that existential question a little bit.

Oscar Schwartz: You mentioned before the way that these type of projects ... They raise ethical questions. And these ethical questions around machines talking have been present since the very first chat bot was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1970s. Are you familiar with the story of ELIZA and Joseph Weizenbaum?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah. And I also love the story of Doctor Turing, but please tell me the story again, because I'd love to hear you tell me.

Oscar Schwartz: Yeah. So Weizenbaum was a computer scientist, and he created a chat bot that he called ELIZA that basically worked like a psychotherapist, so it was unconditional positive regard in question asking. You would speak to it via a typewriter that was connected to a computer, and he test it out on his students at MIT, and his secretary as well, and he was famously very disturbed by the fact that a lot of them were beginning to divulge secrets to the machine, even though they knew it was just a machine. And he was particularly disturbed by the fact that his secretary, who saw him build the whole thing from scratch, asked him to leave the room so she could have a moment of privacy with ELIZA.

Oscar Schwartz: And he ended up writing a book a few years later, which basically said, makings humans talks as if they are humans is deeply unethical, because it's manipulative and it preys on our deep sense of loneliness and need for validation. And we have to stop this right away, because otherwise our society will be screwed. Were these kind of questions, were they raised for you in the making of this project?

Harriet Gillies: Yes, they are and they aren't. What we're dealing with with in this technological, innovative, revolutionary time, is technology with great capacity, and any technology with great capacity can be applied in a positive or a negative way, or in whatever kind of binary you want to put there. So I think, for me, I'm interested in ... I try not to become judgmental about picking a side of whether or not it's more detrimental or more beneficial to the movement of society, or the bettering society. But I totally, on a personal note, feel those things all the time. And I found myself, when directing this show, really falling in love with characters, and the characters are just absolutely nonsense that were totally

randomly put there. So I feel like that's quite a shocking realization about humans more than it is necessarily about technology. I think I'm starting to realize that I think it's more interesting that humans are so incredibly able to buy into things, and to suspend their imagination in order to believe in things and care about things and invest in things. So yeah, I guess that's the thing that I've started to think about more deeply.

Oscar Schwartz: So are you a big user of Siri or Alexa, or any other type of virtual assistant?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, so that's totally hilarious. No, I'm not. Are you, Oscar?

Oscar Schwartz: I'm not, no. I occasionally chat with Siri, but then become frustrated and then just try and break it.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, I feel like I'm quite an old fart in that respect, and I'm quite a technological voyeur, and I don't buy into a lot of these technologies, but I'm really fascinated watching other people. I went to my friend's house the other day, and she has a whole Alexa system that's set up to cameras and so she can see your house. We were out at the bar, and she went on her phone and could see her dog in her house, and tell the machine to put on things in the kitchen. And yeah, I find it absolutely morbidly fascinating, but I'm too scared to jump in myself. But that being said, I am not by any means like an Edward Snowden. I am still totally too lazy to do anything ethical in recommending the bullshit terms in which I live most of my life online.

Oscar Schwartz: It's interesting, because the more time that I've spent thinking about these types of technologies, and the more paranoid I've become, basically, and if you are interacting with Alexa, there's this kind of sense it's like all a big act. It's as if you're speaking to a person, but really you're speaking to a corporation, and that corporation is Amazon. And what they're doing is they're collecting all your data. And as an artist, or as a writer, when you use these tools to examine questions of human identity and emotion, you're also interacting with these big corporations. Is this something that's dawned on you in your practice?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah. I mean, the Internet, and the ownership of personal information is something that I've been interested in and have worked on across a lot of projects, and I've started doing ... Like I'm still kind of taking the piss of it all, and I like to make my audience laugh at stuff like that, hopefully in a way that makes them see it in a different light, and make them think about it. But for instance, the last few shows, I've done all of my music, has been operated off YouTube, and all the audience have to sit through the ads on the YouTube before the show plays, and we all just watch a trailer for the New Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and then go into this really sad, poetic dance piece. So little things like that, where the pervasiveness of the Internet, I'm kind of not letting the holiness of art get away with it that easy. I like to put some of that in there to let us know that we're all being watched.

Harriet Gillies: But also, it's changed my approach to copyright pretty radically, and that's something that you've kind of touched on. You were just saying earlier, and that's always been hard for artists, especially performance artists, to navigate, like a way to commodify their value in the world. But now, with the way that the Internet and AIs can distribute media and content to one another is kind of revolutionizing that whole game, too, and it'll be interesting to see where copyright goes once this interconnectedness kind of continues to rise.

Oscar Schwartz: So do you feel like these distribution methods have made it easier for you to monetize your work, or more difficult?

Harriet Gillies: I suppose it's ... My initial reaction to that question is that it makes it more almost obsolete, in a very idealistic sense. Maybe like this technology is bringing on a revolution that will bring down capitalism. But that's not true, because so much of this technology and something that we haven't talked about, which is quite serious, which has to be spoken about with AI, is the data that is put into these algorithms, right. So all of AI is made of algorithms, and algorithms are given a function or a code by humans. And that code and that data has biases inherently in it. So we act like artificial intelligence has a mind of its own and has this intelligence above us, but we also need to remember that it's made in our image, because the same way that we made God in our image, if that's a fair thing to say, in my personal religious experience, also the Internet and technology and artificial intelligence is being shaped by us. And our biases are there, and there's so much data and amazing people doing research into how racist and sexist data is, because so much of it is done in an industry that's heavily dominated by white men. So that changes the data. So that's another interesting thing to think about.

Oscar Schwartz: Absolutely.

Harriet Gillies: And also, not least to say, most of artificial intelligence, and most technology has always been associated immediately in its first functions to sex or violence, so we know that AI, the race to AI, was between AI soldiers and AI sex robots. So there's also something interesting going on in the psychology of our relationship to these beings there.

Oscar Schwartz: Totally. And also, often the ... In movies, and these kind of virtual assistant applications like Siri and Alexa, they're gendered as female.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah.

Oscar Schwartz: Which is I think ... Laura Penny has a really good article about why that might be the case.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, and I can't remember, but I think there are a couple of apps that are very notably male and they have a different purpose. But I think the female voices are always like the ones that look after us.

Oscar Schwartz: And take orders.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, exactly.

Oscar Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah, but back on the topic of bias, it is kind of something to grapple with when talking about machine language or language generators. We saw a few years ago now, Microsoft's bot, that they let onto Twitter, became racist and homophobic.

Harriet Gillies: Tay Bot?

Oscar Schwartz: Yeah, Tay Bot.

Harriet Gillies: Oh, Tay Bot. What are you doing, babe?

Oscar Schwartz: Yeah, what are you doing?

Harriet Gillies: Get yourself together, Tay Bot.

Oscar Schwartz: And then we've also saw language generators that have shown to associate words in a certain way, so a computer programmer was associated with the word "man" whereas homemaker was associated with the word "woman"-

Harriet Gillies: Exactly. And I ... Everyone can do this as a fun take-home game. Next time you're using predictive text, watch the different gender connotations that come up. It is very interesting, and it does not take long to make you realize that you're dealing with a very biased algorithm.

Oscar Schwartz: It's very rich content for a creative person to work with. Have you had ideas about how to explore these ideas?

Harriet Gillies: Well, the wonderful thing, Oscar, is that it's a paradox, because Tay Bot and this predictive text is actually generated and teaching itself to be better based off what we're actually saying. So that we're saying that these robots or these technologies aren't good enough, but they're literally being made by our collective voices, and what we think and feel and want and do, because they're all tracking all of that. So it's this kind of wonderful tension in which to place art, and I think all really good art that makes me feel things or have amazing experiences is stuff that sits within a paradox and lets me live and experience that contradiction, because it's something that rationally doesn't make sense, but in a lived, embodied sense we all have experienced contradictions or paradoxes.

Harriet Gillies: So yeah, I think it's definitely an interesting place to be making art. I think I'm interested in satire, and we're still in a place where there is so much rich kind of material in satirizing this form just by pointing at it, you know? We're still quite interested in it because it's still really new. But also, it being really new also

means that it's still really unsafe. I listened to a podcast about algorithms the other day, and there was a wonderful academic on it, and she was saying that when the car was invented, it didn't come with airbags or seat belts, these were things that came with time because the consumer demanded it. And the thing about algorithm and technology is so much of it is invisible to us and so much of it we don't understand, so as consumers of this technology, we don't actually have the same awareness of what changes it's having on us. Algorithms and AIs can be changing your schedule or deciding whether or not you get a job or get a home loan. So yeah, I suppose at some point I feel like there's going to be a time where it stops pointing at it, or laughing at it or laughing with it, and starts maybe being a time for activism.

Harriet Gillies: But also the fact that we're aware of it and having these conversations now means, maybe, we'll be able to steer it in the right direction before it's too late. But the funny thing is that the people who are most scared about AIs and are telling us to be afraid of AIs are the ones who are going into laboratories and making them better every day.

Oscar Schwartz: It's true. But for kind of different reasons. They don't seem to be as scared about things like bias. They have these teenage boy fantasies of military takeover, et cetera.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, and this kind of idea that science is ultimately objective, and maybe it is, but our interpretation of it and our practicing of it will always be biased, because we are only ourselves at the end of the day.

Oscar Schwartz: That's true. Back on topic, you just raised just before, about how it is difficult to understand precise how these algorithms work and how language is generated by an application like Siri or predictive text, did you find that you had to learn about these technologies in greater depth when you embarked on this project, and do you think that it's incumbent on an artist to learn how these technologies work if they want to use them?

Harriet Gillies: I don't think that artists should have to learn more about these technologies, necessarily. I still feel like I'm ... You know that feeling when your mom first got email, and you had to teach her how to send an email, it was really frustrating, you got really angry? I still feel like I'm that person in a room whenever we have a discussion about the technology. I still have a very basic understanding of it, and also my brain isn't wired in a way that particularly understands coding. I've tried to learn how to code, and quickly realized I didn't have the patience to stick with it, so ... I think the beauty of artists and art is that they look at it in a ... They look at these technologies perhaps in a different light to how other people are looking at it, so rather than understanding what it does and using a more functional understanding of it, I have been really drawn to looking at, what is the structure of it? What does it actually look like, and what patterns and rhythms does it make, and how do we, where do we see them in nature, and where do we see them in human interaction, and what can that tell us.

Harriet Gillies: Or even, for instance, at the moment my next project is looking at the rise of the image language over an alphabet language on the Internet through meme culture, and how that's making us use the right side of our brain more than previously, because the written word focuses on using the left hemisphere of the brain. So even just things like that. So I suppose it's about exploring this theme in its most abstract, and kind of random ways, but you might hit on something genius, or you might just have a good party doing something about nothing much.

Oscar Schwartz: When did you first become interested in incorporating technological phenomena into your practice?

Harriet Gillies: I was part of an art partnership called Zen which was myself and Roslyn Helper, who wrote the script for Lifestyle of the Richard and Family. And we came to working with technology out of more of a practical necessity to create. We wanted to make shows that allowed audiences to have agency in the kind of audience-artist experience by using forms that were part of everyday life. So we were interested in how you could do a performance over the telephone. And then, yeah, technology ... I guess it's the age we were. It was 2009. We all had Facebook accounts. And I suppose these technologies that were around us just were the things that we knew how to use, and we knew that our audience knew how to use.

Harriet Gillies: So for instance, we did a show called The Internet is Where Innocence Goes to Die, and You Can Come Too. And that was a show where surfed the Internet for an hour, and the audience watches our screen while we surf the Internet, but we do a Facebook chat with the audience. So normal audience interaction, like, oh my God, I'd just sooner pick my toenails off. I would be really terrified. But the second you say, "Oh, just talk to me on Facebook," it's so easy.

Harriet Gillies: So I suppose we found that there was an accessibility to these technologies that became a really important part of our practice, and then from there, the more that we used them, the more we interrogated what they were, and how they exist in our world, and I suppose that's the direction that me and my practice advanced in.

Oscar Schwartz: Where's your favorite place on the Internet now?

Harriet Gillies: Oh, my God. Such a good question. And I don't know. I've actually been really Internet lazy of late. I just got back onto Reddit. I mean, Reddit is kind of like a beautiful town square of wonderful eccentricities. I love the app Binky, which is an app that looks like social media but it isn't connected to anything, so it's just scrolling and liking images, but just by yourself in a void.

Oscar Schwartz: Nice.

Harriet Gillies: And so you click, like reshare, and the thing says, "Do you want to reshare this thing? That means it does absolutely nothing." And you click yes, and then all these thumbs up go everywhere, and they're like, "reshare," and it's about trying to give people the dopamine hit of social media scrolling which is the exact same dopamine hit that you get with pokies and leads to gambling addiction, but that's another conversation perhaps.

Harriet Gillies: But just in a void, so yeah, I like that app a lot. What about you?

Oscar Schwartz: I'm going through a little bit of a crisis of the Internet at the moment, I think as a lot of people are. I just find myself scrolling on Twitter, and feeling terrible about it, but you know, that's just life on the Internet in 2018.

Harriet Gillies: It's a really low time, Oscar, and I think that we'll see a change soon. I mean, I was babysitting someone recently, and she was 13, and she was like, "You have a Facebook account? Ew. Oh, my God, who has Facebook?" Literally, like those exact words. And so I was like, okay, so I'm already an old fart when it comes to this stuff. And I think maybe we're caught in an interesting time, and if anything's certain, it's the advancement of the technological revolution. I hope that there'll be a backlash, and there'll be a generation of people who understand their responsibilities on the Internet, and using technology, but also they'll start valuing their privacy more, and we'll see proper regulation. I mean, that's all stuff that's still ... You know, changes still at the beginning, but I think it could perpetually get better.

Oscar Schwartz: And why do you think ... I mean, how do you see ... You've talked about satire. Do you see your work potentially moving into activism, of consciousness-raising around these kind of more pernicious elements of the Internet and predictive text and data harvesting, and all those type of things?

Harriet Gillies: Yeah. I mean, I'm caught in another little paradox, Oscar, because I feel that sometimes I do want to go away and stop writing about it, or organizing a collection of people, but then I come back to the idea that, actually, I think the best way to say the things I want to say is through art, and not the written word and not through the game that we're playing. And I suppose, I'm interested in art, because I'm interested in imagining possible futures. I don't think I necessarily know how to get there, but I feel like if we can imagine something, it can become so. So I suppose, I think my best efforts are at the front of the plane, trying to imagine the thing that can then become possible, that then can actually happen. So I suppose I'm interested in playing the long game.

Oscar Schwartz: So I'm going to ask you a question based exactly off of that. So if you ... This is a hard question. If you had the capacity to invent any type of talking machine that you wanted, what would you invent? How would you shape the kind of future of this technology?

Harriet Gillies: One thing I'm interested in at the moment is the idea that history is all a lie that one person got to tell us, and I suppose I'm really interested, for instance, in Australia, where we're both from, we have a rich history that's 60,000 years old of pioneers and innovators and amazing inventors, and we don't hear about it. So maybe I'd like a robot who was able to find all of the data and give you the alternative possibilities of history that go against the dominant narrative that we see in the world around us. Because then maybe we'd start being able to throw away traditions that aren't helping us anymore and are hurting us.

Oscar Schwartz: That sounds like a fantastic bot.

Harriet Gillies: That was such a stupid answer, though, I'm so sorry. I'm going to think of such a better answer like within two minutes of this podcast finishing, and then I'm going to be like, oh, snap.

Oscar Schwartz: I thought that was a good answer. And just one final question. Have you come across any other people working in this area who you're like, "Damn, that's really cool stuff?"

Harriet Gillies: Oh, yes. Yes. So many people. And so many ... One of the things that's really interesting about this kind of area of art is a lot of it is guerrilla, so there's a couple of guerrilla groups that I follow who do ... I mean, I also think that ... Oh, this is a big question. So yeah. To stay on the deeply philosophical route that we're at, there's a thing that I've been really interested in recently, which is swatting, which is a very dangerous thing that people do online where they ... Have you heard of this? They will-

Oscar Schwartz: No.

Harriet Gillies: They're playing video games with someone, and they'll have their face up, like on chat, so you can see who's playing each other, and then someone calls a SWAT team and says that there's a terrorist threat or something like this onto the person playing the video game, and on the screen you can watch the SWAT person come in and destroy this person in their actual house, even though you're playing a game in the online space. So I've started thinking about these acts of web performance, I suppose, and what is a performative act and who is the audience of a performative act when it happens in a URL space as opposed to an IRL space? And is it the people watching online, is it the police, is the person who the police attack? And so all of this, I think, is really interesting.

Harriet Gillies: There's another group of artists who are all anonymous, but they go into Minecraft, and once they have set up their survival ... Whatever they need to survive in Minecraft, they start making sculptures in Minecraft, and just have acres and acres of these beautiful sculptures made just by digging in Minecraft. So I suppose I'm still really interested in ...

Harriet Gillies: Oh, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who's an amazing artist who just a retrospective here in Montreal. Did a beautiful piece, where he generated, used an algorithm to generate five different languages and 50 million sentences made of a collection of those sentences, and the work is going to take 50 years to be performed fully. And each question ... It's not sentences, questions. And each question is only mentioned once. So you're watching it, and a little question comes up, and you read it, and it goes away. And that's the only time that question will be asked by this artwork, and it's going to take 50 years to go through them all. So that's really beautiful. I like a lot of pieces that show the futility of it all, and not just of humans, but the futility of technology, too.

Oscar Schwartz: Wow, that sounds like an amazing piece. Well, thanks. That's all my questions. Thanks so much for a brilliant conversation.

Harriet Gillies: Oscar, thank you. It's been great chatting with you. And let's keep in touch about all things AI.

Oscar Schwartz: Definitely, I look forward to seeing your future work.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, maybe our two AIs can meet some time.

Oscar Schwartz: Great idea.

Harriet Gillies: Yeah, cool.

Izzy: The Emerging Writers' Festival brings you the Digital Writers' Festival again in 2018. And you can find the full program live online now. Check it out at digitalwritersfestival.com and join us to listen, learn, and play, right here in hyperspace from the 30th of October until the 3rd of November. Our theme music is the magical Huntley's Please, from their EP, Songs in Your Name. Find them on Facebook as Huntley Music.

Izzy: This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge that First Nations Peoples are the first storytellers of this land, and that their sovereignty has never been ceded. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and to the elders of the lands this podcast reaches.