The New Aesthetic

Be­fore I talk about my own troub­les, let me tell you about an­oth­er book, “Com­put­er Game Bot Tur­ing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “writt­en” by a Mar­kov chain runn­ing over ran­dom Wikipedia ar­ticles, bundled up and sold on­line for a ridicul­ous price. The pub­lish­er, Bet­ascript, is notori­ous for this kind of thing.

It gets bet­t­er. There are whole spe­cies of other bots that in­fest the Amazon Mar­ketplace, pre­tend­ing to have used co­p­ies of books, fight­ing epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Tur­ing Test” we have a de­light­ful futuris­tic ab­surd­ity: a com­put­er pro­gram, pre­tend­ing to be human, hawk­ing a book about com­put­ers pre­tend­ing to be human, while other com­put­er pro­grams pre­tend to have used co­p­ies of it. A book that was never ac­tual­ly writt­en, much less prin­ted and read.

[…] The punchline is that Amazon itself is a bot.