At BIW right now there is an psuedo art criticism chat bot talking into the chat channel – we talked about this some on podcast 58 but we didn’t know who did it– now i hear from Oberon Onmura that its Selavy Oh’s work- Arahan had an interesting comment about this:
Regarding the chat channel piece by the unknown artist. Remember Ichibot did this sort of thing first and he did it best. I felt this was rather empty and lacked the wit and smart subtlety that Ichibot managed to accomplish, it also repeated the same dialogue over and over again and quickly became boring and annoying. I say all this and it might turn out that Ichi did indeed make it but somehow I doubt that, it is much more likely someone ripped off his idea, it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to him at BiW.
NOTE: here is a link to a post about the work by Ichibot that Arahan is talking about
you can see examples of the kind of auto-chat that is is generating here:











thanks for blogging it, jay, and also to the panel of the last podcast. the comment in the podcast (was it don’s?) that the piece is “smart but uninteresting” was right on point. because that was exactly the feeling i had when listening to quite some of the previous podcasts.
as arahan said, what the bot chats is “rather empty”, it lacks subtlety, it quickly becomes “boring and annoying”. yes. this was my intention. the bot’s phrases are dull, repetitive, and uninformed. that’s the reason why i used a pretty simple ‘algorithm’ for generating the phrases, about 20 prefabricated ones (including one with a typo) with a placeholder for the work. far from anything intelligent. i even chose a fixed delay between each utterance, which adds to the machine-like stupidity.
why creating such a work? this spambot was my reaction to the decreasing quality of discourse at BiW, a reflection on the current state of BiW, and as such it should mention the names of the objects on the sim and their owners, but it was intended to be uninformed and annoying (again: i really like the comment in the podcast: smart but uninteresting, yes!).
of course, the bot could have been more realistic by making these empty and uninformed phrases negative instead of positive (that’s what usually happens on the podcasts now), but i didn’t want to hurt the artist’s feelings by negative opinions. perhaps that decision was a mistake. well.
finally, regarding ichibot’s chatbot: i remember that very well, his piece was really gorgeous, and i certainly was inspired by it. i was even surprised that jay didn’t mention ichi’s chatbot in the podcast, because the parallel was so obvious. actually, i considered asking ichibot for help for this one, but finally only showed it to him when it was already running. ichibot then contributed a couple of works with incredible names, which are not visible on the sim, but which were scanned and are mentioned by the chatbot.
Left by Selavy on May 14th, 2009