#define: bot

Allison Parrish defines bots as being procedural, uncreative, data-driven, and as graffiti. Excerpt from her essay:

Bots are procedural.

A bot’s content is automatically generated without human intervention, using a set of predetermined rules and procedures. In this sense, bots are among the latest development in a literary practice that stretches back at least to John Clark’s “Eureka Machine,” created in 1845. The Eureka Machine was not a general-purpose computer, but instead a cabinet-sized purpose-built machine that produced randomly-generated poetry (in particular, Latin hexameter verse). Examples of the use of procedure in 20th- and 21st-century literary arts include Jackson Mac Low’s asymmetries, Charles Hartman’s “Sentences,” and Nick Montfort’s ppg256, a sequence of short Perl programs that generate poetry.

Spammers, of course, use procedural writing because it makes it possible to create millions and millions of tweets (or blog comments, or e-mails, or text messages, etc.) without expending any human labor, beyond programming the procedure. Poets often use procedural writing methods because they produce unexpected turns of phrase: juxtapositions of words and concepts that would never occur to a writer using only their inspiration and intuition.

A Twitter bot that exemplifies the procedural nature of bots is Liam Cooke’s @poem_exe, a Twitter bot that produces ingenious, collage haiku (and haiku-like poems) by randomly juxtaposing lines from an existing corpus of haiku. These poems are sometimes humorous or nonsensical, but more often than not, they’re simply beautiful: peaceful, serene, evocative.

It’s time to stop saying “robot,” and time to create new languages to describe what things actually are.

Today, many of the devices in our lives are really robots working under pseudonyms. A “smart thermostat” is a robot that raises and lowers the temperature of your house. A “smart home security system” is a robot that keeps you safe. A coffee maker with a Bluetooth chip is a robot that keeps you caffeinated. And then there are all the so-called “software robots”: personal assistants like Siri and Cortana, financial “robo-advisors,” and apps that translate foreign languages on the fly.

As more and more household tasks become automated, the number of robots in our lives is growing rapidly. And the rise of connected devices raises a thorny semantic question: namely, where does “automated process” stop and “robot” begin? Why is a factory machine that moves car parts considered a “robot,” but a Volkswagen with a much more sophisticated code base is just a Jetta?

Scholarly blog I ♥ E-Poetry categorizes bots as a genre within electronic literature “that goes as far back as 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a chatterbot that engaged users in conversation through text entered and displayed in a computer terminal. This concept informed interactive fiction from the 1980s and has breathed life into video game characters ever since. Poetically, bots are also related to generative works, producing poetry in many forms (haiku, couplets, sonnets, and more), techniques (n-grams, Markov-chains, templates, variables, etc), and datasets (self-contained, data mining, streaming APIs, user-generated, dictionaries, and more).