1. 문제제기 2. 극우 담론의 작동 요소 3. 사건으로 읽는 테이 4. 이질위상학적 재독의 의미
5. 나가며
This study examines the Microsoft artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot "Tay" incident through the lens of the New Right’s cultural-political strategy, with Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman’s "i’m here to learn so :))))))" serving as the primary object of analysis. Accordingly, it aims to shift existing discussions of AI-generated hate speech, which have largely focused on attribution of responsibility, toward a better understanding of the relational configurations in which technology, culture, and politics intersect. Previous studies on Tay have primarily focused on determining whether responsibility for its hateful utterances should be attributed to the AI itself, extended to the human–machine assemblage, or assigned to the company that developed and operated it. However, such methods have failed to account for the specific pathways through which New Right actors intervened in Tay’s operation, as well as how Internet memes and play culture were appropriated as political resources. Drawing on the concept of the AI assemblage, this study investigates how the New Right’s cultural-political strategy operates through the articulation of heterogeneous elements, including human actors, technological systems, platforms, memes, and cultures of play, which interact and transform one another’s capacities to act. From this perspective, Tay’s hateful utterances are reinterpreted not as accidental algorithmic errors or isolated acts of individual users, but as cultural-political effects produced through the appropriation of Internet cultural forms for the political purposes of the New Right. Furthermore, this study argues that Blas and Wyman’s work reveals, through an archival practice that nonlinearly collects and reconfigures Tay’s utterances and incident traces, how these cultural-political strategies and technological conditions interact in the construction of Tay as a political artifact. As a result, rather than treating the Tay incident as an isolated technological event that occurred in 2016, this study reconfigures it as a case in which Internet cultural forms are appropriated as political resources, and the New Right’s cultural-political strategies are transformed and reproduced within new technological environments through the intersection of digital culture and AI technologies. Thus, it proposes an analytical framework for reconsidering the political interventions surrounding contemporary AI technologies, as well as the cultural conditions that enable their development. |
