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Well, I went ahead and wrote it. An attempt to work through the discomfort people feel with AI agents on social media by reframing it as an aesthetic problem.

tedunderwood.comThe marionette theater of AIIs it funny, or painful, when bots talk about their inner lives?

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒

@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social

9 Feb

If we just think of agents as theater, that’s a useful and interesting framing. But theater does not ask us to entrust with its emotions with a promise of reciprocity, it’s pretty explicitly non-reciprocal. And that’s what I’m really taking issue with, not aesthetics

Ted Underwood

@tedunderwood.com

Mmm — theater comes in different forms, and if I’m to get away w/ comparing social media to theater, I think it wd have to be, like, participatory dinner theater! But I take the point. The awkwardness of bots is that we’re enlisted in the game.

9/2/26, 3:34 am0 reposts11 likes

Dave Palfrey

@01factory.bsky.social

9 Feb

New, disruptive forms of participatory speech at the theatre? Honest theatre-goers suddenly playing a game for which they're not prepared? I'm reminded - not for the first time - of those mischievous unemployed ventriloquists recorded by Myles na gCopaleen, and the Dublin theatre mayhem they caused.