Artistic and Literary Bots in Social Media

This roundtable discussion will explore the practices and poetics of a re­emerging genre in electronic literature and digital culture: the bot. Bots are a kind of generative e­literature, producing poetry in many forms (haiku, couplets, sonnets, and more), using a variety of techniques (n­grams, Markov­chains, templates, variables, etc), and datasets (self­contained, data mining, streaming APIs, user­generated, dictionaries, and more). The history of this e­lit genre goes as far back as 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, the original chatterbot that informed subsequent interactive fiction, and breathed life into video game characters ever since. With the rise of social media, big data, and distant reading methods, bots have become increasingly popular. A distinguishing feature of these bots is that they operate in real time, publishing content on a schedule or responding to specific conditions, drawing data from large and streaming datasets via APIs, filtering search results, reshaping or transforming it, and/or deploying its content through social media, blogs, or webpages.