Exploring the Use of ChatGPT in Building a Twitter Bot

It is Monday, 8:30, the temperature is 25° already, and there is no aircon or ventilation to speak of, so this must be the first paper session at IAMCR 2023. The topic this morning is on artificial intelligence and Twitter, and we start with a paper by Mina Momeni, whose focus is on digital storytelling through Twitter bots. Social media have been populated by a variety of bots that can post and interact with human users on social media, and to some degree mimic human activity as well – and they are being used for both pro-social and disruptive purposes: while there are disinformation and spam bots, of course, there are also many entertaining and humorous bots.

Twitter bots can thus be considered as innovative collaborators in content creation and digital media production, and it is becoming increasingly interesting to explore the uses of artificial intelligence in this context, too. Mina’s interest is also especially in the use of such bots in digital storytelling, and in exploring computational creativity.

Her study created a Twitter bot, @Pario2023, which used ChatGPT to generate new tweets about trending topics (in this case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine); these tweets were collected from the account, and classified according to their content (relevant, humorous, etc.); and human interactions with such bot-generated content were also analysed. The bot produced a range of content (both pro- and anti-Russia).

Such bots may represent a new form of computational creativity, Mina says, but their impact depends on their design principles and adherence to ethical guidelines.