I wasn’t really sure what to talk about and so a while ago I wrote this bot called Bots r cool to try to figure out why we all like bots, and this presentation is the top 20 of those off of Favstar plopped into OutSlide because I really just didn’t want to do any work at all.
Bot Summit 2014 (Page 1 of 2)
The Top 20 Reasons Bots are Cool
presented by Ivy Baumgarten
@congressedits: Politics + Wikipedia + Twitter = ?
presented by Ed Summers
I think there’s a set of bizarre individuals in the Capitol building that once they realized that @congressedits was there and had a lot of followers, they were adding these crazy things to Wikipedia. So in this case somebody’s saying Rumsfeld was an alien lizard.
Bot Activism Through Tools Instead of Content
presented by Rob Dubbin
So what I did was I made a pretty powerful anti-harassment tool, and I’m kind of leery of… It’s one of those things that like I, I feel weird about it because I don’t have a tremendous use for it myself, but I know that other people do. And I’ve talked to people about this, and I sort of made the decision not to put it on Github or be public about it for mainly the reason that I think Twitter is kind of weird with harassment, and I think they’re weird with blocking, and I think they have a strange track record of making the tools that are useful to people who are trying to protect themselves and be safer sort of weirdly harder to access and kind of obscure.
Protest Bots
presented by Zach Whalen
I wrote a letter to my local representative, and he wrote me back and it was this boilerplate of all this bullshit. So I was reading it and just mentally crossing off line after line of bullshit, so I decided to make a bot that does that for me. What it does is it goes into an API that lists members of Congress and their Twitter accounts, picks one at random, picks their most recent tweet, and it retweets it but replaces a certain percentage of all the characters of that tweet with black or gray rectangles so that the remaining amount of letters that you get to actually read is equivalent to the current level of Congress’ approval rating, which I get from The Huffington Post’s API.
Fun With Corpora Manipulation
presented by Thrice Dotted
I guess the two questions that I ask myself when I’m making a bot are what resources and corpora should I use, and how can I manipulate this in interesting ways to come up with tweets that are more signal than noise. A lot of the time it’s actually really hard to generate language that is signal and not noise. And I aim to get a lot of signal in my bots.
Translating World Clock
presented by Nick Montfort
I’m going to talk about a bot-like creation that was occasioned by NaNoGenMo last year, World Clock. It has a rather curious story to what’s happened after I developed it.
Reverse Engineering Netflix
presented by Ian Bogost
But most interesting was just going bonkers with this data in “gonzo mode” and incorporating as much as possible: Viral Plague Sci-Fi Movies Based on Children’s Books Set in Europe for Ages 8 to 10; or First Love Slice of Life Musicals Set in Europe From the 19820s For Hopeless Romantics; Bounty-Hunter Fantasy Movies Based on Books About Cats.
Twitter Bots and Fair Use
presented by Tobi Hahn
I made a bot called @corruptum, and he uses a lot of copyrighted content in his corpus, so I was wondering whether it was legal and whether its use qualified as Fair Use.
Image Bots
presented by Beau Gunderson, Matt Schneider
Why did this happen now? We’ve had update_with_media on Twitter via the API since August 2011, so you could upload pictures for a long time. We got a “rich photo experience” in September [2013]. […] But the short answer is I don’t know why we’ve had this capability for a year and nobody’s done anything with it until now in terms of transforming image bots.
The Lonely Project
presented by Lauren Hallden
You don’t know who they are. It gives you no handles, no identifying information, no location. All you know is they’re typing in English and that is how they’re feeling at this general moment in time. And then it just sends them this tweet. It’s one tweet over and over again: “Someone over here wanted you to know that you’re not alone.”