11 ms·

Weavrs - autonomous Twitter bots

43 points by jaxonrice 14y ago

Tichy 14y ago
Hm, I just realized that I don't like to log in somewhere with my Google account. Too much vital stuff depends on it, and if a site forwards me to a Google login prompt there is always the danger of phishing. Couldn't you provide a classic sign up form? Granted, I may be the last person on earth to use those... Also, why not sign in with Twitter (though I'd really prefer an independent sign up form)?
- zeroinfluencer 14y ago
  Hello. We didn't want to put people through a sign-up process AND then then ask them to fill out Weavrs profiles, so we opted for a 3rd party authentication. If we had used Twitter for Auth, then it becomes very confusing. There's Twitter accounts for Weavrs and for the User. If we had used Facebook, then people get really worried about privacy and Weavrs are not private beings. Nothing gets pulled from your Google account - just your username which you can change in Weavrs.
  - MichaelJW 14y ago
    Getting a generic 500 Server Error when I try to sign up or sign in, FYI.
  - pnzi 14y ago
    Why would using Twitter for authentication be confusing? I think it'd be great.
Swizec 14y ago
At first I wasn't sure what to use this for, but as soon as I saw a bot's homepage (http://lojze.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/ http://lojze.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/) it dawned on me that this is the best way to get cool recommendations for stuff online. At least I think you could be able to tune a bot so it suggests exactly the things you'd like to read.
- zeroinfluencer 14y ago
  You can also add new functionality from the Prosthetic Store. http://prosthetics.weavrs.com/ http://prosthetics.weavrs.com/ or roll your own http://developer.weavrs.com/ http://developer.weavrs.com/
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
flavien_bessede 14y ago
Your homepage needs some work, I'm still unclear on what Weavrs is.
- zeroinfluencer 14y ago
  Agreed - but we're still unsure what they are too. That's why we develop with them.
  - daemon13 14y ago
    Double stealth or triple stealth?
    - Swizec 14y ago
      "The public doesn't know what we do and we don't either ... and neither does our product."
    - zeroinfluencer 14y ago
      "Triple blind testing" as KK would say. http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/mar/10/long-term-trends-in-the-scientific-method/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/mar/10/long-term-trends-in... Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection— no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)
- zeroinfluencer 14y ago
  Agreed - but we're still unsure what they are too. That's why we develop with them.
- moron 14y ago
  Totally agreed. It's a bunch of words about how awesome Weavrs are and calls to action to make them but I still don't know what they actually are. Show some pictures or something.
bazzargh 14y ago
That site got a fair bit of press (and not in a good way) after they set up one of those bots pretending to be the author Jon Ronson. Jon interviewed the people behind it, judge them for yourself: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jon-ronson-spambot-video http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jo...
- phpnode 14y ago
  that was one of the funniest things I've ever seen, they certainly take an interesting position
- bobds 14y ago
  The Weavr guys have posted the backstory of the jon_ronson bot on their blog. It's an interesting read. http://philterphactory.com/2012/04/02/jon_ronson-a-weavr-of-a-gonzo-documenter/ http://philterphactory.com/2012/04/02/jon_ronson-a-weavr-of-...
- smcl 14y ago
  Not sure if it's just me, but those guys come across as extremely unlikeable in that video. I don't get how they seem oblivious to why Jon is upset about it, and even at one point one gets (faux?) annoyed that real Jon is telling people following fake Jon to stop doing so.
  - brackin 14y ago
    The central guy comes across as a total psychopath. Twisting everything he says in a strange way. Almost saying the fact that he uses his name on Twitter makes him self-obsesed. I've just looked at my list of @replies and the last ten are all users using their real names. They have some of the most absolutely weakest arguments I've ever heard yet get away with it. It's as if they don't care if the thousands watching the video aren't convinced at all but if they can annoy Jon they have succeeded. He says the reason he annoys people by making these accounts is because "I want to understand the algorithms that are used by wall street". These aren't really 'robots', they're just scraping wikipedia and pushing out terms in tweets it believes are relevant, which this has shown aren't. "I don't know how you relate to the economic collapse". I don't understand this guy, I don't know if they're acting but if they're serious then I'm worried.
veverkap 14y ago
I didn't like that the weavr bot posted my physical address. I thought giving access to my location would allow it to work in my city, not my actual address. And there is no way to delete that first post.
- yarrel 14y ago
  Did you set it as the Weavr's home address? Change it, and the original address will soon be out of sight and out of mind as the Weavr posts more.
  - veverkap 14y ago
    No, I went to the page to create a weaver and it asked me for my physical location. I wasn't informed that it would be used in that way and I am given no way of deleting that information. Being out of sight and out of mind isn't really good enough.
    - yarrel 14y ago
      Please contact support and they'll see what they can do - https://getsatisfaction.com/philterphactory https://getsatisfaction.com/philterphactory
treelovinhippie 14y ago
Oh damn guys, this is epic. I see what you're doing here. User-generated bots with unique personalities. Generate enough and put them into the wild that is twitter, and you'll quickly find what algorithms are best at "befriending" most people. I'd always predicted pure algorithmic AI would emerge only after we'd stitched together the human hiveAI (a small 7 billion neruons), but it may just grow with it. Here's one (of many) thoughts: imagine generating a twitter bot (sorry, weavr) directly from your search and/or browsing history...
Toenex 14y ago
I'd like to think these things would work because the AI is so smart that they make an intelligent contribution to twitter. Sadly I suspect they might work because it won't take much to improve upon the average tweet.
sequoia 14y ago
Everything about this seems stupid. In the video bazzargh posted these guys come off as absolute pricks, oozing with smugness and condescension and completely devoid of empathy. They use (steal) someone's identity (name + pic), the person asks them nicely to stop and they insult and ridicule him: "You'd like to kill these algorithms; you feel threatened in some way." These guys have such a laughably asinine narrative, I can't believe they deliver it with an (almost) straight face. Why didn't the creators use their own identities? Why didn't they stop using Ronson's when it became clear it was irritating him? To the software output: Maybe I'll eat my words but it seems to be complete garbage. Basically boilerplate, randomly generated spam. I typed "wine" into the "find weavers" box and picked the top result: a weaver/spambot called "In Vino Veritas" (in wine, truth) with a wine glass as an avatar. This should be a good match for wine, I figured! I was asked if I'd like to "chat" with the bot and did so, I pitched it a softball: "What is your favorite wine?" It came back with "I don't know much about wines but I prefer those from California." "In Vino Veritas" doesn't know much about wine? Not exactly crushing the Turing test here... http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr I looked at the bot's profile page and it had a post "I'm dreaming something about #proof and #evidence." In the interview, Ronson says that the bot posted 'Dreaming about #time and #cock,' almost the exact same string with the hashtags substituted. printf("Dreaming of %s and %s", x, y); And we're supposed to regard this as what, cutting edge AI? Winebot that can't say anything about wine, bots feeding random values into preformed strings and tweeting them, taking a word from some interaction (e.g. "wine"), pulling a pic from google and posting to tumblr... nothing here is remotely interesting or new. If the creators weren't such class-a assholes I'd be more polite in my assessment, but as they can't be bothered to care about how their actions affect others, I don't feel the need to. They've done their controversy-color-by-numbers thing and got their publicity, the product (?) is worthless, the sooner their 15 minutes passes the better.
- evanlivingston 14y ago
  I don't think anyone is bragging about the algorithms here. No one claims it passes the Turing test. The AI isn't the real point. Furthermore, since when does someone's name + picture pass as their identitym That's exactly what this trio is pointing out. After doing some research, it appears that these guys in the video are not programmers, but artists and professors. http://zeroinfluence.wordpress.com/projects-archive/ http://zeroinfluence.wordpress.com/projects-archive/ http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxManchester-Dan-OHara-Skeuom http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxManchester-Dan-OHara-Skeu... http://www.danohara.co.uk/cv.html http://www.danohara.co.uk/cv.html If we continue this critique, can we stop judging the quality of their algorithms (which they're probably not interested in) and instead critique the artistic value of emulating human online behavior?

43 points by jaxonrice 14y ago

Tichy 14y ago

Hm, I just realized that I don't like to log in somewhere with my Google account. Too much vital stuff depends on it, and if a site forwards me to a Google login prompt there is always the danger of phishing. Couldn't you provide a classic sign up form? Granted, I may be the last person on earth to use those... Also, why not sign in with Twitter (though I'd really prefer an independent sign up form)?

zeroinfluencer 14y ago
Hello. We didn't want to put people through a sign-up process AND then then ask them to fill out Weavrs profiles, so we opted for a 3rd party authentication. If we had used Twitter for Auth, then it becomes very confusing. There's Twitter accounts for Weavrs and for the User. If we had used Facebook, then people get really worried about privacy and Weavrs are not private beings. Nothing gets pulled from your Google account - just your username which you can change in Weavrs.
- MichaelJW 14y ago
  Getting a generic 500 Server Error when I try to sign up or sign in, FYI.
- pnzi 14y ago
  Why would using Twitter for authentication be confusing? I think it'd be great.

Swizec 14y ago

At first I wasn't sure what to use this for, but as soon as I saw a bot's homepage (http://lojze.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/ http://lojze.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/) it dawned on me that this is the best way to get cool recommendations for stuff online. At least I think you could be able to tune a bot so it suggests exactly the things you'd like to read.

zeroinfluencer 14y ago
You can also add new functionality from the Prosthetic Store. http://prosthetics.weavrs.com/ http://prosthetics.weavrs.com/ or roll your own http://developer.weavrs.com/ http://developer.weavrs.com/

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

flavien_bessede 14y ago

Your homepage needs some work, I'm still unclear on what Weavrs is.

zeroinfluencer 14y ago
Agreed - but we're still unsure what they are too. That's why we develop with them.
- daemon13 14y ago
  Double stealth or triple stealth?
  - Swizec 14y ago
    "The public doesn't know what we do and we don't either ... and neither does our product."
  - zeroinfluencer 14y ago
    "Triple blind testing" as KK would say. http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/mar/10/long-term-trends-in-the-scientific-method/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/mar/10/long-term-trends-in... Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection— no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)
zeroinfluencer 14y ago
Agreed - but we're still unsure what they are too. That's why we develop with them.
moron 14y ago
Totally agreed. It's a bunch of words about how awesome Weavrs are and calls to action to make them but I still don't know what they actually are. Show some pictures or something.

bazzargh 14y ago

That site got a fair bit of press (and not in a good way) after they set up one of those bots pretending to be the author Jon Ronson. Jon interviewed the people behind it, judge them for yourself: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jon-ronson-spambot-video http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jo...

phpnode 14y ago
that was one of the funniest things I've ever seen, they certainly take an interesting position
bobds 14y ago
The Weavr guys have posted the backstory of the jon_ronson bot on their blog. It's an interesting read. http://philterphactory.com/2012/04/02/jon_ronson-a-weavr-of-a-gonzo-documenter/ http://philterphactory.com/2012/04/02/jon_ronson-a-weavr-of-...
smcl 14y ago
Not sure if it's just me, but those guys come across as extremely unlikeable in that video. I don't get how they seem oblivious to why Jon is upset about it, and even at one point one gets (faux?) annoyed that real Jon is telling people following fake Jon to stop doing so.
- brackin 14y ago
  The central guy comes across as a total psychopath. Twisting everything he says in a strange way. Almost saying the fact that he uses his name on Twitter makes him self-obsesed. I've just looked at my list of @replies and the last ten are all users using their real names. They have some of the most absolutely weakest arguments I've ever heard yet get away with it. It's as if they don't care if the thousands watching the video aren't convinced at all but if they can annoy Jon they have succeeded. He says the reason he annoys people by making these accounts is because "I want to understand the algorithms that are used by wall street". These aren't really 'robots', they're just scraping wikipedia and pushing out terms in tweets it believes are relevant, which this has shown aren't. "I don't know how you relate to the economic collapse". I don't understand this guy, I don't know if they're acting but if they're serious then I'm worried.

veverkap 14y ago

I didn't like that the weavr bot posted my physical address. I thought giving access to my location would allow it to work in my city, not my actual address. And there is no way to delete that first post.

yarrel 14y ago
Did you set it as the Weavr's home address? Change it, and the original address will soon be out of sight and out of mind as the Weavr posts more.
- veverkap 14y ago
  No, I went to the page to create a weaver and it asked me for my physical location. I wasn't informed that it would be used in that way and I am given no way of deleting that information. Being out of sight and out of mind isn't really good enough.
  - yarrel 14y ago
    Please contact support and they'll see what they can do - https://getsatisfaction.com/philterphactory https://getsatisfaction.com/philterphactory

treelovinhippie 14y ago

Oh damn guys, this is epic. I see what you're doing here. User-generated bots with unique personalities. Generate enough and put them into the wild that is twitter, and you'll quickly find what algorithms are best at "befriending" most people. I'd always predicted pure algorithmic AI would emerge only after we'd stitched together the human hiveAI (a small 7 billion neruons), but it may just grow with it. Here's one (of many) thoughts: imagine generating a twitter bot (sorry, weavr) directly from your search and/or browsing history...

Toenex 14y ago

I'd like to think these things would work because the AI is so smart that they make an intelligent contribution to twitter. Sadly I suspect they might work because it won't take much to improve upon the average tweet.

sequoia 14y ago

Everything about this seems stupid. In the video bazzargh posted these guys come off as absolute pricks, oozing with smugness and condescension and completely devoid of empathy. They use (steal) someone's identity (name + pic), the person asks them nicely to stop and they insult and ridicule him: "You'd like to kill these algorithms; you feel threatened in some way." These guys have such a laughably asinine narrative, I can't believe they deliver it with an (almost) straight face. Why didn't the creators use their own identities? Why didn't they stop using Ronson's when it became clear it was irritating him? To the software output: Maybe I'll eat my words but it seems to be complete garbage. Basically boilerplate, randomly generated spam. I typed "wine" into the "find weavers" box and picked the top result: a weaver/spambot called "In Vino Veritas" (in wine, truth) with a wine glass as an avatar. This should be a good match for wine, I figured! I was asked if I'd like to "chat" with the bot and did so, I pitched it a softball: "What is your favorite wine?" It came back with "I don't know much about wines but I prefer those from California." "In Vino Veritas" doesn't know much about wine? Not exactly crushing the Turing test here... http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr I looked at the bot's profile page and it had a post "I'm dreaming something about #proof and #evidence." In the interview, Ronson says that the bot posted 'Dreaming about #time and #cock,' almost the exact same string with the hashtags substituted. printf("Dreaming of %s and %s", x, y); And we're supposed to regard this as what, cutting edge AI? Winebot that can't say anything about wine, bots feeding random values into preformed strings and tweeting them, taking a word from some interaction (e.g. "wine"), pulling a pic from google and posting to tumblr... nothing here is remotely interesting or new. If the creators weren't such class-a assholes I'd be more polite in my assessment, but as they can't be bothered to care about how their actions affect others, I don't feel the need to. They've done their controversy-color-by-numbers thing and got their publicity, the product (?) is worthless, the sooner their 15 minutes passes the better.

evanlivingston 14y ago
I don't think anyone is bragging about the algorithms here. No one claims it passes the Turing test. The AI isn't the real point. Furthermore, since when does someone's name + picture pass as their identitym That's exactly what this trio is pointing out. After doing some research, it appears that these guys in the video are not programmers, but artists and professors. http://zeroinfluence.wordpress.com/projects-archive/ http://zeroinfluence.wordpress.com/projects-archive/ http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxManchester-Dan-OHara-Skeuom http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxManchester-Dan-OHara-Skeu... http://www.danohara.co.uk/cv.html http://www.danohara.co.uk/cv.html If we continue this critique, can we stop judging the quality of their algorithms (which they're probably not interested in) and instead critique the artistic value of emulating human online behavior?