I used to play MUDs, MUCKs and MUSHes, for several decades. Naturally, once they incorporated programming languages, a few players ventured to write bots. (For my part, I implemented Conway's "Game of Life", which was synchronous and notorious for freezing up the server.)<p>One highly successful bot had an extensive inventory of reactions, triggers, actions, and absurd nonsensical sayings. He was quite beloved. I'm not sure that I was ever able to peek at the source code, but it was surely complex and expanded over many years of development. This bot was imbued with such perspicacious insight and timing that we often treated it as a sentient player in its own right. Indeed, it became one of the most prolific chatters we had, along with yours truly.<p>Another time, one of our players went on vacation, call him "J"; and to fill the void, someone created "Cardboard J". And it was a very simplistic automatic bot, just loaded with one or two dozen sayings, but it was hilarious to us, because it captured the zeitgeist of this player, who didn't role-play and wasn't pretentious about his character; he just played himself.<p>Other players were known to keep extensive log files. I believe that sometimes the logs were published/leaked to places like Twitter, at least the most dramatic ones. I was involved in at least two scandals that were exposed when logs came to light.<p>I can only imagine what it'd be like to interact with a chatbot trained on <i>me</i> for the past 30 years!