In 2022, a new kind of technology arrived into the world — LLM chatbots. It was around this time, I stumbled into a subculture I've started to get obsessed with. A subculture around bot making.
Hey, I'm Shakti Mb, a documentarian, filmmaker, and artist. This web archive contains found objects from my two years of lurking in online spaces where people make AI bots together. The most rigorous experiments around making a bot's personality feel "real" are happening within these spaces. These found objects include discord chat messages, PDF personality creation guides, JSON personality code, and bot requests I collected and saved. The most interesting thing I found was sharing JSON files.
This film is an invitation for you to be a voyeur in these spaces with me. If you're interested in human behavior, internet subcultures, or the psychology of botmakers — this film is for you.
This project is supported by Rhizome, NEW INC, Emergent Ventures, Mozilla.
