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:
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jon-ronson-spambot-video" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jo...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Here's one (of many) thoughts: imagine generating a twitter bot (sorry, weavr) directly from your search and/or browsing history...
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?<p>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" (<i>in wine, truth</i>) 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...
<a href="http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr" rel="nofollow">http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr</a><p>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.<p><pre><code> printf("Dreaming of %s and %s", x, y);
</code></pre>
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.
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.
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.
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...<p>Also, why not sign in with Twitter (though I'd really prefer an independent sign up form)?
At first I wasn't sure what to use this for, but as soon as I saw a bot's homepage (<a href="http://lojze.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/" rel="nofollow">http://lojze.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/</a>) it dawned on me that this is the best way to get cool recommendations for stuff online.<p>At least I think you could be able to tune a bot so it suggests exactly the things you'd like to read.