Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Proof of an afterlife?

Either these spambots are using strange sentence-generating algorithms, or there's a guy in a Shanghai spam factory using a Ouija board to channel James Joyce:
A zenith was the adjoining replica – to the distant rolex in suspect watches the most surprising din from the features into delgado – and he must impatiently fold and sleep, relatively focus columns.
Or perhaps Umberto Eco has taken a night gig...
.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or those bathtub Cylons have finally found a new job.

jf

Anonymous said...

Word salad.

Characteristic of certain psychoses and dementias, although heavy doses of psychoactive drugs can mimic the same effect.

Alath
Carmel IN

Tam said...

Alath,

In this case, it's neither hebephrenia nor too much of the brown acid, but just a boring old algorithm intended to evade certain types of spam detection by generating a "post" long enough to let a couple links and keywords register as innocuous.

So, actually, it's oddly closer to the bathtub Cylons than we'd like to think...

Anonymous said...

It's called a Markov chain generator.

Please don't lower the bar on the Turing test...

See also Racter.

Tam said...

I did not know that.

(Still, I find the idea of a computer program trying to convince another computer program that it's really a human fascinating.)

Borepatch said...

Ya know, who needs a college education when they can just read you? That juxtaposition of Spam with Joice was so sweet that it hurts.

I hope that your readers are paying attention. If someone followed up on your cool-but-obscure references for a couple years, they could even hang out at Upper West Side wine 'n cheese soirees. Assuming they'd want to, of course.

Your Free Internet Ice Cream is pretty tasty, intellectually speaking.

Tam said...

Coming from you, that's a heck of a compliment.

I actually blushed. :o

Steve Skubinna said...

Spam or not, you could enter that in a modern poetry contest, and likely win.

I think it deftly skewers our modern consumerist zeitgeist. And, um, shit like that.

Anonymous said...

There's actually website dedicated to "spam poetry." I shit you not.

www.spampoetry.org

"The Spam Poetry Institute is an organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the fine literature created by the world's spammers."

The internet, it has everything!