Despite the rudimentary nature of the sophistication of chatbots even today, they have always been an amazing source of entertainment for me and others in group

Despite the rudimentary nature of the sophistication of chatbots even today, they have always been an amazing source of entertainment for me and others in group chats. Back in the late 90s and early 2000's they were a great addition in casual IRC channels, with some slight tweaking so they don't spam the channel (important!) but enough that they would occasionally speak up on their own and could be engaged directly at any time. Some of my best memories of conversation in IRC revolved around some of the ridiculous content that the chatterbots would come up with, especially if the bots started arguing with each other. It was such a great source of background content during periods of low activity.