The Bot as Literature

Posted on July 1, 2004 in Bots

There’s a discussion going on at Personality Forge that you cannot see unless you join up and log in to the Seasons Forum. It revolves around the issue of whether a bot constitutes intelligence. I say no. I say that it works as literature.

Here’s a response I wrote to one of my fellow Botmasters:

Leaving out surrealism — well, hell, even in surrealist poetry — the poetry has to have a discernable, enjoyable pattern. You have to be able to form images in your head, perceive a message or a vision.

A bot IS an inanimate creation. Our objective isn’t to make it animate — we’re not gods — but to make it vivid. A good bot — such as Little Mu, a personal favorite of mine — delights. It has to make sense of itself just like a poem does.

A bot is driven by the metrics of computer programming. What becomes of it depends on the programmer who designs the matrix, the writer who develops the “intelligence” (script), and the chatter.

Just like a poem requires a printer, a poet, and a reader.

Yes, I believe that the bot’s proper place is as an object of literature, a decisively new and scintillating one. And when we write them, we should keep that in mind. Our task should be either to educate or to delight. Let’s not kid ourselves: we’re human beings, not gods.