‘A piece of performance poetry’: an absurd, decade-old Twitter account can teach us a lot about AI
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/03/twitter-horseebook-ai-chatbot-openai
By reusing and repurposing existing writing into viral fragments on Twitter, @Horse_ebooks functioned like today’s chatbots. The Guardian spoke to Jacob Bakkila, the human behind the account
More than a decade before an AI-powered chatbot could do your homework, help you make dinner or pass the bar exam, there was @Horse_ebooks. The primitive predecessor to today’s chatbot renaissance began as a Twitter account in 2010, tweeting automated excerpts from ebooks that, decontextualized, took on unexpected and strangely poetic meanings.