This article examines how users cognitively process social chatbot output as a novel form of participatory, generative “character,” co-produced through human–AI interaction. Reporting on the results of empirical research on user responses to the social chatbot platform character.ai, it shows how cognitive stylistic and narratological approaches to character can be utilised but also must be developed to analyse and theorise users’ experience of and interaction with generative AI agents. It makes specific contributions to cognitive stylistics, rhetorical narratology, character studies, and research on gen AI chatbots by: (1) illustrating how the concept of mind-modelling can used to analyse the ways in which users linguistically anthropomorphise social chatbots; (2) developing two new audience response types – transmimetic and hypermimetic – to respectively capture ways in which users assess chatbots against prior knowledge of characters across media and cases where chatbots appear so convincingly human that users question their ontological status; (3) proposing the concept of ‘postdigital misperception’ to reflect the way that users of AI can misattribute the ontological origin of an LLM’s output. The article demonstrates how social chatbots are reshaping how users understand character, agency, and reality in interactive, participatory and generative digital contexts and argues that social chatbots epitomise postdigital experience in blurring the distinction between the digital and non-digital as well as fictional and real.
The lived experiences of COVID-19 pandemic are reflected in many creative media practices. This article highlights how engaging with ekphrastic writing offers readers a means of approaching recent pandemic events through engagement with art, enabling creative reflection on lived experience through visual-verbal mediation. Treating ekphrasis as both a creative and interpretative practice, this article examines how linguistic strategies of ekphrastic intervention shape participants’ engagement with abstract art and how participants negotiate the resulting ekphrastic composition in light of their pandemic experiences. As part of the Writing and Reading the Pandemic project, this article examines two forms of response inspired by and connected to the pandemic: an ekphrastic poem written during lockdown and readers’ discussions of an ekphrastic composition in an online reading group. The data for the analysis consist of an ekphrastic poem ‘Self-Portrait in Quarantine’ by Alarie Tennille, which is written in response to Guillermo Wiedemann’s abstract painting Figure (1959) and published during the first wave of lockdowns in April 2020. Drawing on the model of ekphrastic intervention, we examine the conceptual relations established between the artwork and its poetic rendering, extending previous applications of the model beyond figurative art to abstraction. Reader-response data are then examined to explore how participants integrate and negotiate these cross-media relationships, and how engagement with ekphrastic covid poetry opens a pathway to deeper empathetic alignment and reflection on lived pandemic experiences of the self and the other.
