A new Facebook bot turns your status updates into nonsense comedy

Now you, too, can become a Facebook bot!

By Kate Knibbs November 14, 2013

today facebook bots bot — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’ve often wondered what you’d post online if you were a bot, first of all, that’s depressing as hell, but second of all — you no longer have to wonder. A new bot called What Would I Say? for Facebook mashes up your previous public statements into ridiculous, hilarious, sometimes completely nonsensical status updates. Like Twitter’s Tofu Product, it takes things you’ve said in the past to create a new post — but What Would I Say? generates these sayings instantly, so you don’t have to wait for Tofu Product to respond (which is especially important because Tofu often doesn’t write back).

To use What Would I Say?, you go to the website, which prompts you to sign in through Facebook. Then you click on the button that says “generate status” and up pops something bizarre culled from things you’ve posted on Facebook in the past. If you think it’s particularly funny, you can share the update directly to Facebook.

What Would I Say? was created during PrincetonHack2013, and it works by using a Markhov chain to generate gobbledegook word soups that will probably amuse you more than they should. From what I can tell, it’s usually cobbling together two or three parts of old status updates and photo captions into mysteriously entertaining sentences.

Here’s some of the stuff mine churned out:

fb bot examples — Image used with permission by copyright holder

A few more favorites? Here you go, in text form:

We’re going to eat my camera we BROKE UP.
Hiro Dreams Of our crotches tonight.
does anyone subscribe to the internet.
I’ll PM everyone who is Kardashians.

I could go on. And on. Turns out it’s really fun to see your inane posts rejumbled into crazytalk. You can also see certain celebrity Facebook status updates reordered, but it’s not as fun — I hope they develop What Would I Say? for Twitter, since there’s plenty of mirth to be derived from reordering Kanye West’s bon mots.

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