‘A piece of performance poetry’: an absurd, decade-old Twitter account can teach us a lot about AI

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 …

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