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Weekends are boring, so today I set myself a project to stave off boredom. This is part of the result.
I downloaded Pyborg, and set it up to join 6 of the most active sex-oriented IRC channels on Dalnet. Pyborg is an AI chat bot that supposedly uses a Markov Chain algorithm to formulate ostensibly coherent responses based on previous input — if you’re not familiar, google it.
I then let it idle — under the alias “lonelygirlrach” — in them for an hour, and logged all the private messages she received. This word cloud represents the 150 most common words uttered in the “conversations” that took place between lonelygirlrach and numerous horny men in that time. I don’t know exactly how many private messages she got; the format of the logs makes it difficult to tell at a glance, but I’d estimate around 25 unique nicknames are accounted for.
As you can see, there are very few surprises. “Fuck”, “asl”, “hi”, and “cock” are all staples of the sex-starved man. “Cam” and “MSN” have good showings too — in most of the exchanges I observed, they wanted to switch to MSN Messenger ASAP to take advantage of its webcam support.
The most interesting thing is that in an hour, in at least 25 conversations, hardly anyone guessed she was a bot. The word “bot” was not even frequent enough to be included in the cloud, and a quick search through the logs reveals only two people that decided definitively that lonelygirlrach was nothing but a computer program. And one of them continued to pester her for chat regardless.
She’s still in there now, getting harassed. Poor thing.
Some of my favourite exchanges from the last hour continue below.
