Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

The world of online fandom has come out against recent strides in disruptive technology: crusading against crypto, for instance, and protesting the widespread scraping of art for use in the training of visual AI programs.

The world of online fandom has come out against recent strides in disruptive technology: crusading against crypto, for instance, and protesting the widespread scraping of art for use in the training of visual AI programs.

Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

When science fiction writers first imagined robot invasions, the idea was that bots would become smart and powerful enough to take over the world by force, whether on their own or as directed by some evildoer. In reality, something only slightly less scary is happening.

Pop culture these days is awash in tales of AI run amok, from machines that act like humans to humans in love with machines. The reason seems clear enough: We're anxious about a world in which machines have superseded us. But it isn't just armchair philosophy.

The Turing Test has a serious problem: it relies too much on deception… Consider the interrogator asking questions like these: How tall are you?
 Tell me about your parents.

By the time she started saying “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” people had started to realize that there was something wrong with Tay.

At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines.

Really, really racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far below the baseline of ethical botmaking.

Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you from it might seem to be an odd or even dangerous idea, but we’ll all soon take it for granted.

The Random Darknet Shopper art project is no longer under investigation, but the MDMA it bought on Agora was destroyed. Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo are !Mediengruppe Bitnik (read - the not mediengruppe bitnik). They live and work in Zurich/London.

In a welcome sign of the coming singularity, Buzzfeed just announced that it has built a sentence generator that mimics the turgid writing style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

I wrote a short piece for Grafik Magazine’s Screenshot feature: Moravec’s Paradox states that ‘low-level’ sensorimotor skills require far more computational resources than ‘high-level’ abstract reasoning. In general terms, this translates into the doctrine that computers are very good at solving some types of problems, humans at others. Picking out the face of a loved one in a packed crowd and walking over to embrace them is laughably easy for a human to do, but not a robot. Alternatively, calculating the square-root of 1,276,433,9 takes a cheap pocket calculator a few nanoseconds. As for a human? Well, try it out for yourself * Sustained by these principles, a new breed of machine/human hybrid systems have begun infecting our social and economic networks. Rather than imitate tasks that humans can do effortlessly, these programs are built to work with us, allowing the distinct strengths of human and ‘artificial’ intelligences to coalesce. One particularly intriguing example of this is the reCaptcha password system. Maintained by Google, reCaptcha is employed hundreds of millions of times every day, according to Google’s own promotional blurb, to ‘stop spam, read books’. You yourself — perhaps without knowing it — have taken part in a vast online act of computation, donating a short burst of your highly evolved pattern recognition skill to Google’s project of digitising every one of the world’s printed books. The reCaptcha system is doubly fascinating in regards Moravec’s Paradox because it marks the meeting-point between low-level and high-level computable problems. Every password is guessable given enough time and computer resources. Alternatively, the smudged word on page 286, line forty three of the Magna Carta is incredibly difficult for a computer to recognise. If it fails, a different smudge with a different ‘solution’ is pulled from the database, ensuring your email account remains secure. Whilst determining whether or not you are a human the reCaptcha software quietly hijacks your biological brain, translating the task it has been allotted to protect your data into a moment of distributed, invisible labour. The question is: who or what is using who or what, for what or whom? Systems like reCaptcha could be hailed as the birth of a ‘world brain’: a thinking web connecting everyone on Earth into a vast meta-mind capable of incredible feats of computation. The truth, however, is both far more mundane and far more profound in its implications. A generation or two ago we envisaged the future as a place where intricate machines would carry out most menial tasks, leaving humans free to contemplate their place in the universe, embrace loved ones in crowds, and sunbathe under the depleted ozone layer. Instead, we have inherited a world where humans carry out menial tasks at the bequest of machines, whilst maintaining the illusion that it is we, personally, who have benefited from each transaction. Every click and swipe of your finger is a collaboration between invisible entities — corporate, synthetic or not-even-invented yet. Next time you scan your own produce at the supermarket, track your eating and exercise habits, and upload them to a corporately maintained database, follow the advice of a piece of software on which stock to sell, or which car to buy, search Google for a weird string of misspelt terms, or retweet a Twitter bot, you are taking part in a vast experiment that has already evolved beyond any single person or machine’s ability to comprehend. The future of information is augmented, symbiotic, invisible and incessant. But does it belong to users? Corporations? Or semi-autonomous machines? Only you and your synthetic assistants can decide. * The answer, according to my smartphone, is 3572.7215116770576

Submitted w/out comment: "Simply Become Immortal" http://t.co/vT48jQ1KZT (via @therourke) http://t.co/sTbOFQHGfg – Chris Lindgren (lndgrn) http://twitter.com/lndgrn/status/431445405440569347

The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of every word in the English language; Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded; Constantine XI, in 140 character chunks; Sun Tzu's Art of War, in its entirety; the chapter headings of JG Ballard, in abundance; and definitive discographies of Every. Artist. Ever...

All this, I repeat, is true, but one hundred forty characters of inalterable wwwtext cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.

I’m particularly interested in the political uses of technology-enabled deception—uses that I suspect are likely to become more prevalent in the near future.

Two of my rules for constructing useful and interesting scenarios are to (a) think about what happens when seemingly disparate changes smash together, and (b) imagine how new developments might be misused. In both cases, the goal is to uncover something unexpected, but (upon reflection) disturbingly plausible. I’d like to lay out for you the chain of connections that lead me to believe that we’re on the verge of something big.

This is the raw text output of a chat session with a bot I modified to act as an interlocutor. I use our conversation, which revolves around the history of spam, particularly algorithmic filtering, litspam, and the theories of Wiener and Turing, as a way of putting forward the outlines of new, machine-driven forms of language for which spam was the testing ground.