Roboboblogs

A series of artificial personalities, defined by a list of interests, post on their personal blogs on the popular Livejournal platform. At the time, I knew a lot of people solely through their LJ, which was also a proto social network (with profiles, followers, comments, ...). I was interested in this idea that someone could have an existence simply by having an online blog and writing in it. In the continuation of the Cellule project, I tried to create artificial, automated individuals that would exist through the same output and interfaces as actual humans.

Each Livejournal user could list their interests on their profile. I manually filled on these interests to give each of my bots their own "personality". To write a new post, a bot would pick one of their interests, run a series of Google queries to find sentences containing that word, and assemble them (with some connections : "also", "by the way", etc) into posts. Some keywords would be picked to find related pictures through the Flickr API, to illustrate the post. Some would also be added to the bot's interests, so they evolve with time. Since I didn't have a server back then, I would manually run the script on my computer to have my bots post to their blogs.

It was my first experience with automated text generation, something we would explore deeper with Lionel Maes in La Corrélation de Schottky.

The robots' blogs