# Convivium
> Artificial companions invite old questions into unfamiliar settings: what makes a friendship, what do we owe something we create, and how can we tell the difference between being understood and feeling understood?.

## Entries
- [Session 1: Aristotle's Three Kinds of Friendship and the Question of Artificial Companions](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/aristotle-three-kinds-friendship/): In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes friendships based on usefulness, pleasure and mutual appreciation of character.
- [Session 4: Ovid's Pygmalion and the Statue That Comes to Life](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/ovid-pygmalion-artificial-companions/): Ovid's story of Pygmalion describes a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has made and receives divine help in bringing it to life.
- [Session 5: Frankenstein and the Creature's Request for a Companion](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/frankenstein-creature-companion-request/): In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Creature asks Victor Frankenstein to create a female companion because he expects that another being like himself might.
- [Session 8: Hoffmann’s The Sandman and Olimpia: A Reading on Projection, Recognition and Artificial Companionship](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/hoffmann-sandman-olimipia-seeing-desire/): E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman asks what happens when someone mistakes an appearance for a person who understands them.
- [Session 9: Weizenbaum's ELIZA Paper: A Primary-Source Reading on Machines, Language and Human Trust](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/weizenbaum-eliza-1966-reading/): Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 paper on ELIZA describes a computer programme that produces conversational responses by transforming patterns in a user's language.
- [Specimen 1: How to Read an AI Companion Platform: A Short Guide to Design, Friendship and Artificial Intimacy](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/contemporary-ai-companion-platform-reading/): An AI companion platform can be read as a designed cultural object: its characters, presentation and forms of interaction establish expectations about intimacy.

## About
- [About Convivium](https://convivium-8sp.pages.dev/about/): what the site covers and how entries are made

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