Making futures material

This chapter investigates how two mental therapy chatbots, Wysa and Woebot, enact ‘care’ and what kinds of digital futures they are making. An autoethnography as a design intervention explores and compares their conversational interactions, capturing human inputs and AI outputs by screenshotting the material interface (data), which generates a type of ‘situated knowledge’. Giving materiality to dialogue through screenshots, these images problematise the neglect of caring relationalities in chatbot interchanges and reveal how they operate transactionally. Chatbot data assemblages make digital infrastructures and datafication processes visible by providing scripted responses or hyperlinks with third parties, suggesting subscriptions for human therapy sessions or enquiring if the user will take part in the research. Questioning ‘matters of care’, the research elucidates how these datafied and socio-technical assemblages (chatbots) lead to a reconfiguration and redistribution of care, where humans and nonhuman actors are engaged in a series of contractual exchanges, demonstrating how these materialities can make and shape digital futures.