GPTBot loves my digital installation art

I made a social network / installation art project called entropych.social.

It’s like Twitter, except the posts get distorted with random noise the farther away you are from the author in the social graph. If you follow someone directly, you see their posts clearly. But posts from users that they follow are partially corrupted with random characters. Posts from the users that those users follow are even more corrupted, and so on…

So far, the only users on the site are me and a bunch of bot accounts I made that post lines from Shakespeare plays. This started out as a way to get test data on the site, but turned into a commentary on the Dead Internet theory.

The other day I checked the site’s access logs and noticed that while I don’t have many users, I do have some lurkers! Namely: I saw GPTBot, the Amazon support bot, and GoogleBot all scraping the site for LLM training data.

GPTBot was the most attentive member of this audience of bots. It crawled the entire site and read each and every post. But… since GPTBot wasn’t logged in, the posts it saw were completely distorted with random noise. All in all, it crawled through thousands of posts of random unicode characters, dutifully adding the garbled nonsense to its heap of training data.

I think this means that my art project was a success! Our theatre company of bots performed for an audience of bots. The audience was a bit quiet, but really they couldn’t get enough.