Bots: A definition and some historical threads – Data & Society: Points

I am a poet and artist, and I make Twitter bots. The term "bot" encompasses many different kinds of software agents, from conversation simulators like Eliza, to programs that write stories about sports events without human intervention, to automatically created social media accounts that spam hashtags. The bots I make have an artistic and literary bent: for example, I made @everyword -- which tweeted every word in the English language in alphabetical order over the course of seven years -- and more recently @the_ephemerides, which tweets computer-generated poetry juxtaposed with NASA imagery. I'm part of a community of bot-making artists (loosely known as #botALLY) who are taking the canvas of social media and covering it with computer-generated writing and other kinds of generative art. As part of Sam Woolley's provocateur-in-residence workshop at Data & Society, I was asked to write a provocation regarding automated agents and bots from my perspective as a poet and artist.