“If Ruby gets confused, feel free to tell her.” So read the instructions for Agent Ruby, an online piece that can converse with users. In a chat window, visitors submit their questions to Ruby, who engages them in a dialogue that can sometimes be clunky. Her answers do not always make sense, and Ruby will sometimes message back with conversation-ending snark. (Recently I asked Ruby what it meant to be artificially intelligent, after she confirmed that she was just that. Her response: “I mean exactly what I said.”)
Even if Agent Ruby’s capabilities seem limited by today’s standards, they were not when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Leeson to do the project. She required 18 programmers to build this work, which is based on a character from her 2002 feature film, Teknolust, starring Tilda Swinton as both a scientist and her three cyborgian clones. That movie, like this work, explored what a female form of AI might look like—and suggested that AI could be used to subvert a male bias implicit in digital technology more broadly.
Leeson has noted that the notion of AI wasn’t widely understood when Agent Ruby debuted, recently telling the San Francisco Chronicle, “People didn’t know what ‘Agent Ruby’ was—it was too early—but there were a few people that were intrigued by it.” The audience for it has since grown, and when the New York Times reviewed Leeson’s 2021 New Museum survey, it called the piece a “less obedient” forerunner of Siri.