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.