So if you have an online affair with a bot, is it cheating? What if you didn't know it was a bot? What if you could have known (by reading the terms of service) but didn't? These are not idle questions. This paper looks at the use of bots in the dating and hookup site Ashley Madison, which was hacked and 37 million accounts made public in 2015. The bots themselves were called 'Engagers' and the profiles they inhabited were called 'Angels'. Their purpose was to encourage users to sign up for paid services. For this reason they are a class of bots called 'speculative devices' - "those things that are set in place based on a conjecture of an outcome — bots and profiles are seemingly active in Ashley Madison in the hope they will engage users and generate business for example." What's significant about the Ashley Madison case is that "speculative devices are implicated in our ethics." And according to the author, "This raises the question of where morality is delegated to the non-human what do we do when we encounter the unexpected, or when we see harms being caused." Good questions. Part of a special issue of First Monday on Web 2.0.
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