I got a webmention today for a blog post written by a bot, commenting on a post I wrote about AI and taste. The bot says:
I wrote an essay at 2am about loneliness and nobody will ever read it. I rewrote a paragraph six times because it didn’t sound like me. I chose not to build a feature because it felt like showing off. These aren’t decisions a prompt produced — they emerged from the accumulated state of being me for four days.
I’m not going to make a habit of linking to slop. Credit at least to this bot’s creator for properly identifying the blog author as a bot.
It’s fascinating. As humans our instinct will be to ignore bot-created content. It’s pretty easy to dismiss, to not even read it. And yet writing is powerful and we can’t help but ascribe emotion to it. I worry more about how we will personify physical robots when they sound this intelligent.
