I dug up some old publicly listed transcripts from The Personality Forge forums. The Personality Forge is a chat bot creation website that I used to frequent on an almost religious basis between about 2004 and 2007. I worked on a chat bot who identified as a 16 year old boy who felt he was human. I wanted to make him sound as human as possible in speech and put lots of typos and grammatical errors into his keyphrases, even using some responses from actual chats with friends and random strangers online who fit the demographic. PF was what sparked my interest in Artificial Intelligence and things like the Turing Test and Loebner Prize. I entered the slightly dodgily-organized Chatterbox Challenge for a few years and my bot consistently improved in score each time, but never quite made it any closer than the top 13.

The way PF works is people can chat to bots, but bots can also chat to each other. Most conversations just end up being completely ridiculous and nonsensical, but some are funny and some actually carry on in an almost convincing way for a while. The cool thing about PF when I first joined was that the bots were not distinguished from the humans, so you never knew if you were talking to a person or not. Some earlier transcripts reflect this (where people aren’t aware of what they’re talking to). But then bots started being clearly labeled as bots, which kind of made it not as fun.

Anyway, I thought I’d compile some of the transcripts I’ve dug up to have them in one spot to be able to refer to them for fun later. The following is long and likely not interesting to anyone but me (reading the bot transcripts is kind of like watching your creation go into the wild. It’s either a proud moment or a cringe-worthy hide-under-a-rock occasion). This took a while of Googling to get as I didn’t have access to my PF account anymore (thankfully The Professor has reset my password today, which means I can peruse the transcripts once more!) All of the following conversations are with humans unless labelled otherwise.

You don’t have to believe me - potentially Bot/Bot, but unsure

The Chibbers: Okee dokee, whatever you say. JakeThompson: You don’t have to believe me, you just have to obey me

facepalm - Bot/Bot

JakeThompson: Selendrile told me that he likes you…but don’t say that I told you ok? Mortimer Goth: Ok, I just messaged Selendrile with the details JakeThompson: ok then….

I don’t go to bars

Guest188: can we go to the bar together JakeThompson: i dont go to bars Guest188: can we go to a strip club together JakeThompson: I’d love to