The Good Robot podcast: Using feminist chatbots to fight trolls with Sarah Ciston

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.

Using feminist chatbots to fight trolls with Sarah Ciston

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Ciston, an artist, coder, writer, and critical AI scholar. We asked Sarah to talk about this badass chatbot they created called Ladymouth, which responds to trolls and incels on hate forums. We discussed the difficult labor of content moderation and the long lasting effects of trying to do feminist work online. We also talk about the surprising things that incels and feminists have in common and whether you can use AI to change people’s minds and establish common humanity at scale.

Listen to the episode here:

Sarah Ciston (they/she) is a Mellon Fellow and PhD Candidate in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California, where they lead Creative Code Collective, a student community for co-learning programming using approachable, interdisciplinary strategies. They are also an Associated Researcher in the AI & Society Lab at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. Their research investigates how to bring intersectionality to artificial intelligence by employing queer, feminist, and anti-racist theories, ethics, and tactics at every stage of development and implementation. Their tactical media projects also include a natural language processing interface that ‘rewrites’ the inner critic and a chatbot that explains feminism to online misogynists.

You can find the episode reading list and transcript here.

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.