Three headline-generating bots were revealed at New Scientist Live

Bots sometimes get a bad rap. Automated accounts on social media platforms have been accused of many abuses, including large-scale political manipulation, but they aren’t all bad. Speaking at New Scientist Live in London today, Tony Veale from University College Dublin, Ireland, and Mike Cook from Queen Mary University of London argued that bots can also be forces for good.

For example, there is a whole world of Twitter bots created for fun and for art that don’t pretend to be human, unlike those with more serious or sinister aims. These bots often follow in the footsteps of surrealist artists, working to make the everyday seem new and fascinating again, said Veale.

“Bots expose the artificiality of language,” he said. “When a bot strives to be creative, people respond creatively.” People choose to follow bots online to see how they subvert our expectations by building language algorithmically rather than intuitively, he said.


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Cook showed a number of examples, including a bot that tweeted every word from the dictionary in order, provoking unexpected engagement with certain words – notably, “butt” received far more retweets than average.

“Tony [Veale] and I and lots of people in our field see this as the future of creativity,” said Cook. Just about anyone with an idea and a marginal understanding of coding can build their own bot, and its success relies on how others online interact with it. “Some of the best bots are incredibly simple. It’s really about how it works in the space that it’s in,” he said.

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Cook also demonstrated three Twitter bots that he had created specifically for New Scientist Live. All three use a set of 45,000 New Scientist headlines that have appeared online since 2003 to build new and strange headlines, but each bot uses a different method.

The first bot uses a neural network that learns from the original set of headlines to generate strange new ones, including gems such as “Self-destruction of the brain power” and “Inside the most powerful thing”.

The second uses a Markov chain, which works by learning what words generally go together in New Scientist headlines and combining them in common orders. Its output includes “Global warming: Will the anaconda or the ‘Garbage of Eden’?” and “A total solar eclipse with non-addictive cigarettes by alien worlds without words”.

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The final bot uses a simpler protocol similar to cut-and-paste methods used by artists like David Bowie. Cook divided the headlines into lists of topics; the bot replaces words from a headline under one topic with words from another. Its output included headlines such as “There may already be crows on Mars”, “Tiny pebbles may be the reason most politicians spin in the same direction” and “Leopards that live in memes are protecting people from rabies”.