From “How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist,” by Sarah Jeong in Motherboard (3/25/16):

“Most of my bots don’t interact with humans directly,” said Kazemi. “I actually take great care to make my bots seem as inhuman and alien as possible. If a very simple bot that doesn’t seem very human says something really bad — I still take responsibility for that — but it doesn’t hurt as much to the person on the receiving end as it would if it were a humanoid robot of some kind.”

So what does it mean to build bots ethically?

The basic takeaway is that botmakers should be thinking through the full range of possible outputs, and all the ways others can misuse their creations.

“You really have to sit down and think through the consequences,” said Kazemi. “It should go to the core of your design.”

For something like TayandYou, said Kazemi, the creators should have “just run a million iterations of it one day and read as many of them as you can. Just skim and find the stuff that you don’t like and go back and try and design it out of it.”

“It boils down to respecting that you’re in a social space, that you’re in a commons,” said Dubbin. “People talk and relate to each other and are humans to each other on Twitter so it’s worth respecting that space and not trampling all over it to spray your art on people.”

For thricedotted, TayandYou failed from the start. “You absolutely do NOT let an algorithm mindlessly devour a whole bunch of data that you haven’t vetted even a little bit,” they said. “It blows my mind, because surely they’ve been working on this for a while, surely they’ve been working with Twitter data, surely they knew this shit existed. And yet they put in absolutely no safeguards against it?!”

According to Dubbin, TayandYou’s racist devolution felt like “an unethical event” to the botmaking community. After all, it’s not like the makers are in this just to make bots that clear the incredibly low threshold of being not-racist.

Trump is said to be an effective campaigner because voters perceive his “I tell it like it is” persona to be real. Yet his coterie turns around and says that the shit-stirring, plainspoken, politically incorrect identity is the act, and the “real” Trump is a more thoughtful kind of guy.

From “Who Is the Real Donald Trump?,” by Charlotte Triggs and Sandra Sobieraj Westfall in People (03/30/2016):

But who can know the real Trump when he deflects serious questions with non-sequiturs?

When PEOPLE asks about the comparisons that have been made between him and Adolf Hitler, Trump peels off a quick “Well, that’s ridiculous,” then says it’s all because “the last person Hillary [Clinton] wants running against her is me.”

Complicating attempts to understand him is his insistence that his public persona isn’t the same as his private one. “I think I’m somewhat different. I’m a much nicer person than people would think, to see me from the outside,” Trump says.

“On the one hand you might see that as bad. But on the other hand you don’t want people to know you that well.”

Friends vouch for the alter-ego premise, saying that Trump’s bellow and bluster (critics call it bigotry and buffoonery) is an act, put on by a salesman and reality TV star for ratings.

“Donald is a showbiz guy, and his talk is his shtick,” says one friend, Christopher Ruddy. Another, Omarosa Manigault, who starred on Trump’s TV competition series The Apprentice, says he hasn’t yet “made the total shift from entertainer.”

Both, like a dozen others who know Trump personally, tell PEOPLE that this offstage Trump – “caring and kind,” says Ruddy; “far more thoughtful and measured,” as British journalist and Apprentice alum Piers Morgan put it – is the real Trump.

Nick Denton in Gawker, writing on the jury verdict in the Hulk Hogan trial:

Celebrities, especially ones as public about their personal and sex life as Hulk Hogan, have a narrower zone of privacy than ordinary people. Regardless of questions about Gawker’s editorial standards and methods, self-promoters should not be allowed to seek attention around a specific topic and then claim privacy when the narrative takes an unwelcome turn. The benefits of publicity come at a price; and for someone like Hogan, whose whole life is a performance, it’s a full-time and long-term commitment.

On the stand, Hogan claimed his sexual boasts and inconvenient public statements fell under the umbrella of his “artistic liberty” as an actor. He can be untruthful when in character, he admitted cheerfully, and he is in character whenever he leaves his home. That split personality was revealed at its most bizarre when he gave an example: Hulk Hogan the character has a bigger penis than Terry Bollea the man, he said. Hogan’s is public, Bollea’s is private, but the fact is that most of us can’t tell the character from the man — especially when the trademark bandana is worn by both, even in court.

Fine, that confusion may be a symptom of the modern era, in which everyday life itself becomes a performance on talk radio, reality television, or social media. Indeed, Hogan’s lead counsel spent some time explaining to the jury the concept of “scripted reality,” in which performance and real life are blurred. We heard an echo of the argument recently, when a spokesperson for Donald Trump dismissed his long history of misogynist remarks as the words of “a television character” rather than a presidential candidate.

But these always-on celebrities should not be surprised when their credibility is questioned, and journalists attempt to sort out what is real and what is fake.

“After the ‘Nice’ Debate: Trump’s Shape-Shifting Power,” James Fallows (The Atlantic, 3/11/16):

Trump talks up his background as a business executive, but the background that really matters is his years as a reality TV star. All politicians need to be actors. But by nature or by experience, Trump is just far better at it than anyone else in the field. The magic is that every one of these roles and tones seems “authentic” to him. That is a large part of why he’s gotten this far, and why the Democrats have to take him seriously. Ronald Reagan, as an actor-presidential candidate, had nothing in the dramatic-skills range over Trump.

“The surprising ways the body works with the brain to shape our sense of self,” by Anil Ananthaswamy in Quartz (3/3/16):

German philosopher Thomas Metzinger has argued that the feeling of being embodied is a pre-reflective, pre-linguistic form of selfhood — a sense that our ancestors must have had long before humans gained the capacity to use the personal pronoun in phrases like “I think.” There is no narrative in this kind of bodily self; just the ability to feel anchored in a body and distinguish between the self and the non-self.

Eventually, evolution gave us memory, cognition, culture and the ability to construct narratives. All of this has allowed us to form a psychological self that works in conjunction with our bodily one.

“Like This So I Know I’m Real,” Bethlehem Shoals in Hazlitt (2/24/16):

Our sense of self-worth — on the Internet and perhaps beyond, insofar as the structure of the web is increasingly the structure of our daily lives — comes not from whether or not our actions are judged in a positive light but by whether they are noticed and judged at all. The idea of spectacle or stunt is nothing new, but they’ve always been regarded as a stretch, a desperate ploy to get oneself seen no matter the impetus or eventual consequences. The need to be “liked,” as opposed to admired or well-regarded, is that same philosophy popularized, defanged, and accepted as a necessary part of mass culture. It’s akin to “any publicity is good publicity.”

We might not care to admit it, but such cynicism has become the price of admission. There’s no value judgment, no good or bad, only a value-neutral proposition that precedes any actual opinion. The fallacy of Facebook’s new options is exposed in the interface itself: All still fall under the rubric of “like,” as if emotional tenor is secondary to the decision to react in the first place. Regardless of how we feel, we must first make that all-important commitment to feel something…

But the basic, harsh truth of the Internet is that seeing and being seen remain the only ways to feel like you’re participating in the first place. We don’t exist because we will ourselves into being — we exist because others deign to notice. All we can do is try our best to strike a balance between saying what needs to be said and caring too much about what others will “like” — which is to say, whether they “like” (and like) us at all.