Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay

Gina Neff and Peter Nagy’s 2016 International Journal of Communication article studies reactions to the Tay public chatbot incident.

Evidence and argument

The authors selected 1,000 tweets from unique users commenting on Tay between March 23 and April 6, then interpreted recurring themes through qualitative phenomenological analysis (p.4923). Users framed Tay as a victim of people or a threat to them. The authors propose symbiotic agency: actions arise through relationships among human users, technological capacities and context.^[1]

Alignment relevance and limits

The editorial relevance is to accountability: perceived personality can obscure the people and design decisions enabling an output. The authors explicitly exclude a comprehensive account of Tay’s evolution or an explanation of its inner workings (p.4917). This is interpretive social research, rather than a technical audit or a representative measurement of public opinion.^[1]