Posted 1/3/2024, 3:00:00 PM
Artist reveals he manually controlled popular absurdist Twitter bot @Horse_ebooks for 2 years, exploring ideas of authorship between human and AI.
- @Horse_ebooks was a popular Twitter bot account created in 2010 that tweeted absurdist fragments from ebooks, amassing over 200k followers at its peak
- In 2013 it was revealed that artist Jacob Bakkila had been manually controlling the account for 2 years prior, purchasing it from a spammer and "performing" as the bot
- Bakkila wanted to explore ideas around authorship between bot and human, reusing existing text similarly to how today's AI chatbots build language models
- Bakkila believes we still foist human traits onto machines, but glitches reveal their limitations; sophisticated AI could fade as growth predictions fail
- The account resonated by tweeting mysteriously fragmented texts that left people wanting to fill in the gaps, but Bakkila feels the piece was a performance artwork with a set lifespan