Twitter: The Best of Bot Worlds for Automated Wit

Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic content. Rather than always putting our own thoughts into our own words, we often convey feelings through the words of others, by citing, quoting, mimicking, borrowing, varying or ironically echoing what others have already said. Social networking platforms such as Twitter elevate linguistic reuse into an integral norm of digital interaction. On such platforms, who you follow and what you re-tweet can say as much about you as the clothes you wear or the art you hang on your walls. But not everyone that is worth following is human, and not everything that is worth re-tweeting was first coined by a real person. More and more of the witty and thought-provoking content on Twitter is generated by bots, artificial systems that write their own material and vie for our attention just as humans do. Real people knowingly follow artificial bots for reasons that are subtle and diverse, but a significant reason is surely Twitter itself. This paper explores Twitter as a smart environment for automated wit, and describes the mechanics of a wittily inventive new Twitterbot named @MetaphorMagnet.