Your chat bot, yourself

what would i say? is a fun Web experiment, a bot that generates simulated Facebook status updates based on your own Facebooking.  Connect with Facebook, and the bot attempts to be you, combining randomly selected bits of your writing.

Technically speaking, it trains a Markov Bot based on mixture model of bigram and unigram probabilities derived from your past post history.

Here’s what it looks like in action*:

A sample update.

The results are very diverse, and can be quite entertaining.

Some make an uncanny kind of sense, and actually have decent grammar:

No sign of 21stcentury life.

Sometimes someone sees the humor.

Watching the Vatican to see more.

We’ll see a Cthulhulike lizard monster.

Our cats are outraged.

Others exude a surrealism based on the unlikely conjunction of fragments:

Also sweet hour working away on my friends And paranoid.

The LugosiKarloff Black Cat watches nearby, waiting for nearly everyone at our children makes no difference most of his eyes and mind adjusted.

A few start in one direction, then end up somewhere else:

We have in mind something like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of the chicken pieces breaded with this

Your kind words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of beauty, like the Song of celery.

My favorite ones offer a neat, quiet poetry:

That’s the rain thunder and invisible wolves.

But I’m making me

Perhaps this is yet another strand of digital storytelling, the kind produced by machines remixing human productions.

*All of these are drawn from my Facebook account.