Move over, chatbots: meet the artbots

At Facebook's F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company's head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines. The chatbots aren't very good, but that doesn't mean Facebook isn't proud of them anyway: "I guarantee you're going to spend way more money than you want on this," Marcus chuckled on stage. But even though Facebook might want to sell itself as the pioneer of chatbots, the real leaders in the field aren't working in the AI research teams of silicon valley; they're collaborating at events like last week's BotSummit in the V&A, or this weekend's Art of Bots exhibition in Somerset House. Move over chatbots: it's time to meet the artbots. BotSummit, now in its fourth year but held outside the US for the first time, is the creation of internet artist Darius Kazemi, whose medium he describes as "bots and generators and other weird internet stuff".