That question has never been more relevant, as people increasingly use AI-powered chatbots not just as an alternative to Google, but as therapists and friends. It’s still just taking language that humans previously wrote and giving it back to humans When does the bot end and when does the human begin?” Bakkila said. “I wanted to draw on the tension of authorship, both between myself and the fact that it was originally a literal spam bot. Language learning models, the technology upon which apps like ChatGPT is built, work by crawling large troves of human writing, analyzing patterns in human speech and spitting back that speech to the user based on context clues. It was always pulled from previously written text.”īy reusing and repurposing existing writing, the account functioned similarly to today’s more advanced chatbots, albeit on a smaller scale. “Nothing that tweeted – either when it was an actual automated spam bot, or when it was myself – was ever written originally. “My goal was to reverse engineer how the bot approached things on the internet,” Bakkila said. The New York City artist purchased from an actual spammer in 2012 and then simulated its “speech” – tweeting excerpts from books at random intervals and “performing” as the bot 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In 2013, it was revealed that real-life human being Jacob Bakkila had been responsible for tweets from the account for the preceding two years.

Its most memorable quip – “everything happens so much” – still resonates today. It amassed more than 200,000 followers at its peak and now, despite being inactive for a decade, the account still holds 131,000 followers. Purportedly a spambot, the account surfaced quotes from ebooks that went viral for their absurdist fragments – phrases like “Hello saxophone,” “COULD THIS BE THE”, and “Today we are lucky to be talking”.

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