Only hours before “Rapture 2: Fingers Crossed This Time”, there was an epic showdown of a different nature between a sex/chat/bot and Clive “The Robot” Thompson, noted technology writer and bon vivant.

Impressively, The Robot beat the Chatbot on a clear TKO, boring it into silence. If there had been an cyborg referee, it would have stopped the chat fight in the 8^th round.

Which reminds me…

For a while, in 1995, I wrote critical reviews of spam. I was working as copywriter, including writing emails, and thought analyzing the poor form of these amateur marketers would be interesting and useful to writers in traditional marketing transitioning over to interactive formats.

In about 3 months, the spam emails continued improving until one day, I caught myself critically reviewing an email someone on the general side of the agency had sent me.  In just a few months, the Nigerian Princes and Viagra Merchants had evolved to sound more like human beings than actual $300/hour copywriters sitting just a few floors up from me.

16 years later, a pretty simple piece of code can sound more human than 90% of posts on brand pages on Facebook.

Which gives me an idea for a business…

Brand style guide + Eliza chatbot code = Social Media Automation!

Just wind BrandEliza up, and watch the “Likes” spiral into the stratosphere!

Couldn’t be any more impersonal than half of what I see in my feed on a daily basis.

BTW, I suspect if the chatbot had been coded to respond with random quotations from Hobbes and Kant, The Robot would probably still be chatting.

Bentham56689:  “All right, sir, give me your credit card to verify you are old enough to talk about the Categorical Imperative .”

Clive:  “Visa OK?”