Event Date
Can we treat AI chatbots as a literary form? The talk interweaves insights from three projects: a simulation of Dr. Muhammad Ahmad's deceased father (which has been running for a decade); a Rabbi Bot created in collaboration with a religious authority; and a chatbot built with the science fiction writer Joan Slonczewski to extend a fictional character from the novel Minds in Transit (2025). The talk examines how conversational AI reconfigures authorship, character, and ethical representation. Across all three projects, the chatbot speaks from a bounded corpus, performing an identity that is iteratively interpreted. This is similar to how a character is sustained through commentary, adaptation, or reader response. This raises ethical questions about consent, authority, and responsibility. The talk will explore how chatbots render identity visible as a narrative practice shaped by constraint, lineage, and design. Dr. Ahmad will discuss chatbots as instruments of cultural transmission whose identity depends equally on accuracy and interpretation. He will also argue that the apparent intimacy or authority of chatbots is not a property of the systems themselves, but the result of ethical decisions about who is permitted to speak, under what constraints, and with whose accountability.
Muhammad Ahmad is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center and an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington, Bothell.