The article at hand theorizes the political economic shift between the aesthetic strategies deployed by network television in the broadcast-era and those deployed in the matrix-era. It argues that where in the former era certain strategies allowed for the disciplining of viewers’ sensory dimensions and in turn allowed for the ‘factory’ process of watching-labour to penetrate the private lives of people, in the latter era this factory process has not only collapsed into the home but also into viewers’ sensoria. And, that this is due to the nature of the control mechanisms embedded in the new aesthetic strategies deployed by media-capital through second-screen technologies. This article concludes by theorizing said set of mechanisms as an iteration of a society-wide aesthetic of control essential to the operation of contemporary capitalism.
Conversational agents are rapidly advancing in terms of their capabilities and human likeness -both of which are intended to enhance the user experience and engagement. One human quality that can potentially increase trust and likeability is humor. However, what is considered humorous and what is not depends on many contextual and personal factors that are not only difficult for machines to detect, but even humans are still struggling to understand them. This makes training AI to be humorous highly challenging. But is this due only to the technical limitations? In this provocation paper, we discuss the hindrances to utilizing humor in commercial conversational agents and propose addressing this topic from a social and political perspective.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Natural language interfaces.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.