‘Where does the bot end and human begin?’: what the legendary @Horse_ebooks can teach us about AI

‘My goal was to reverse engineer how the bot approached things on the internet,’ Bakkila said Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

More than a decade before an AI-powered chatbot could do your homework, help you make dinner or pass the bar exam, there was @Horse_ebooks. The primitive predecessor to today’s chatbot renaissance began as a Twitter account in 2010, tweeting automated excerpts from ebooks that, decontextualized, took on unexpected and strangely poetic meanings.

Purportedly a spambot, the account surfaced quotes from ebooks that went viral for their absurdist fragments – phrases like “Hello saxophone,” “COULD THIS BE THE”, and “Today we are lucky to be talking”. It amassed more than 200,000 followers at its peak and now, despite being inactive for a decade, the account still holds 131,000 followers. Its most memorable quip – “everything happens so much” – still resonates today.