Computers, in their many forms, have primarily been made to make mundane tasks simpler to accomplish. From Excel spreadsheets that replaced thousands of accountants to smartphones that have put a large amount of computing power in the palm of your hand, each programmer in the world is working towards the goal of making things easier to accomplish. However, not all of these tasks have the public’s best interests at heart. Robots (or “bots”, as I will refer to them)—the kind that roam around the internet collecting and spewing data for other bots to analyze and collect and spew in a never-ending cycle—have a place in the world because humans made it so. So today, I’m going to tackle the simple Twitter bot.
Twitter “ebooks” bots are a sensation. If you have not heard of an ebooks bot, you should try looking around for them. The term ebooks came about from a Twitter bot called “horse_ebooks” that was made to advertise for a website called horse-ebooks.com, and was unique in the way that it got around Twitter’s spam filter. Randomly, it would select a few words from an internet archive somewhere to generate readable tweets, but which had absolutely no context. This made for some particularly interesting tweets, not limited to the following:
As the internet often decrees, a cult following followed this Twitter bot’s every move, constantly coming up with inside jokes, phrases, and mannerisms that were depicted by the random content generated by horse_ebooks. And although all of this seems innocent, I think it is worth it to take a look at what can come out of these kinds of things and check out what else some of these bots can do.
Currently, version 3 of Twitter_ebooks is in production today. It is incredibly easy to take your own Twitter history (or anyone else’s for that matter) and create a bot that spits out randomly generated, grammatically correct tweets. Some of them are hilarious, others are profound, and most are confusing. For instance, a joke inspired someone in Australia to make an ebooks bot characterizing Tony Abbott, prime minister of Australia. And, because the bot uses a lot of terminology associated with Tony Abbott’s official Twitter account, there have been some that confuse this bot with the prime minister himself.
Some use this system as a way to curb abuse, harassment, or other things that can be perpetuated through Twitter. The more public your profile, the more you have to separate the wheat from the chaff when reading through your notifications. The iOS jailbreaking scene (“jailbreak” being the term used when you allow your iPhone to run unsigned code) is dominated by those seeking the next jailbreak on the new firmware released by Apple. At any given time, there are only a select few that have dabbled in iOS kernel work, and whenever their work results in a jailbreak of some kind, they are usually flooded with tweets. Some have used these ebooks bots as a way to mitigate the flood of questions that come from random twitter strangers by having those bots take care of the replying.
But it is easy to see how this could become a way for harassment to perpetuate. If someone is skilled enough, harassment can be programmed into a bot (or series of bots) by a single person operating alone, bullying people who voice differing opinions from the creator. To steal a cliché from Spiderman, “with great power, comes great responsibility”, and that is incredibly true in our generation that has a lot of free time and a *lot* of computing power.
With every new development in technology, I think it is important to take a look at both sides of the coin. While it is easy to view their novelty and laugh, you need to remember that this technology is completely backwards-compatible with the people that mean to do harm. Ensuring that a technology meant for connecting people and sharing experiences stays just that—a connection between people—is a tough job. Let’s not ruin it for ourselves by creating bots that harass. Stick to the funny ones that confuse the general population.
Twitter “ebooks” bots are a sensation. If you have not heard of an ebooks bot, you should try looking around for them. The term ebooks came about from a Twitter bot called “horse_ebooks” that was made to advertise for a website called horse-ebooks.com, and was unique in the way that it got around Twitter’s spam filter. Randomly, it would select a few words from an internet archive somewhere to generate readable tweets, but which had absolutely no context. This made for some particularly interesting tweets, not limited to the following:
Do this now: Sit down,
— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) November 5, 2011
Why many people achieve very little despite spending most of their time
— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) September 22, 2013
As the internet often decrees, a cult following followed this Twitter bot’s every move, constantly coming up with inside jokes, phrases, and mannerisms that were depicted by the random content generated by horse_ebooks. And although all of this seems innocent, I think it is worth it to take a look at what can come out of these kinds of things and check out what else some of these bots can do.
Currently, version 3 of Twitter_ebooks is in production today. It is incredibly easy to take your own Twitter history (or anyone else’s for that matter) and create a bot that spits out randomly generated, grammatically correct tweets. Some of them are hilarious, others are profound, and most are confusing. For instance, a joke inspired someone in Australia to make an ebooks bot characterizing Tony Abbott, prime minister of Australia. And, because the bot uses a lot of terminology associated with Tony Abbott’s official Twitter account, there have been some that confuse this bot with the prime minister himself.
Some use this system as a way to curb abuse, harassment, or other things that can be perpetuated through Twitter. The more public your profile, the more you have to separate the wheat from the chaff when reading through your notifications. The iOS jailbreaking scene (“jailbreak” being the term used when you allow your iPhone to run unsigned code) is dominated by those seeking the next jailbreak on the new firmware released by Apple. At any given time, there are only a select few that have dabbled in iOS kernel work, and whenever their work results in a jailbreak of some kind, they are usually flooded with tweets. Some have used these ebooks bots as a way to mitigate the flood of questions that come from random twitter strangers by having those bots take care of the replying.
But it is easy to see how this could become a way for harassment to perpetuate. If someone is skilled enough, harassment can be programmed into a bot (or series of bots) by a single person operating alone, bullying people who voice differing opinions from the creator. To steal a cliché from Spiderman, “with great power, comes great responsibility”, and that is incredibly true in our generation that has a lot of free time and a *lot* of computing power.
With every new development in technology, I think it is important to take a look at both sides of the coin. While it is easy to view their novelty and laugh, you need to remember that this technology is completely backwards-compatible with the people that mean to do harm. Ensuring that a technology meant for connecting people and sharing experiences stays just that—a connection between people—is a tough job. Let’s not ruin it for ourselves by creating bots that harass. Stick to the funny ones that confuse the general population.
These bots are so interesting. I think these bots are an interesting thing for philosophers interested in consciousness to think about. Clearly these bots do not have intentions but they can create original sentences that seem to have intention. It shows how we can never before if an agent is really concussion or not.
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