Last week we had a bizarre conversation with alleged Twitter bot @tofu_product, but we had some doubts about it’s authenticity. Is it really a bot, or just a person trying to Horse_eBooks us? Since then the creator has reached out to us to assuage some of our doubts. Here’s what programmer Joe Toscano had to say.
@Tofu_product is a bot that claims to attempt to write like you do. It does this by pulling words and phrases from your past tweets and rearranging them. It doesn’t do a great job of creating real sentences, but it’s hard to argue against the absurd beauty of tweets like:
@glentickle I’m currently obsessed with getting floppy.
— tofu (@tofu_product) October 9, 2013
A big reason we were suspicious of @tofu_product was the delay in responses. While presumably a bot could pull random words from a tweet together almost instantly, at times it was taking several minutes for the bot to respond. Toscano explained this to us in a tweet, saying the reason for the delay is Twitter’s limitations:
@glentickle After about 100 tweets, Twitter refuses to let tofu tweet anymore.
— Joe Toscano (@jtoscano42) October 11, 2013
While also assuring us that @tofu_product really is a bot, Toscano explained that he’s trying to get around the limitation:
@glentickle Yep, tofu is 100% bot. Its delay in responding is the result of me testing different ways to deal with Twitter’s limitations.
— Joe Toscano (@jtoscano42) October 11, 2013
At this point, we’d love to take Toscano at his word. He seems like a decent enough fellow, and any remaining doubt we have about @tofu_product has nothing to do with him. We’re just not sure we’re ready to trust another Twitter bot after Horse_eBooks. So way to go, jerks at Bear Stearns Bravo. You’ve ruined our ability to trust silly Twitter bots doing silly Twitter bot things. Maybe not forever, but certainly for now.
@Tofu_product is still a lot of fun either way, and resulted in our new favorite sentence, “I’m currently obsessed with getting floppy.” So if you want to have a weird conversation with a robot, or perhaps a weirder one with a human pretending to be a robot, check it out on Twitter.
(via Twitter)
- Our initial conversation with @tofu_product was ridiculous
- Horse_eBooks may have ruined our ability to trust another bot
- The people behind it were jerks, and then felt bad about being jerks
