Satirical Chatbots

Published on 2026-08-09 by Emma Juettner

Inspired by a toot from Darius Kazemi and the ensuing replies, I went down a rabbithole of satirical (non-AI) chatbots. These are art projects consisting of chat interfaces that either return deterministic responses or connect you to an actual human who responds to your prompts. Each one comments on the current AI hellscape in its own way. It's very "the medium is the message."

Here are the ones I've found so far:

I think these chatbots are an interesting way to reflect on what people want from AI vs what they're actually getting. Some people are looking for factual information. Some people are looking for a neutral third party to bounce ideas off of. Some people are looking for meaningful interpersonal connection. An AI chatbot is not really the best solution for meeting any of those needs, but billions of dollars are being poured into convincing people that it is. I think satirical chatbots like the ones above are useful provocations that hopefully make people think a little more about what they actually want from the tools they use.

This reminds me a little bit of all the cool web art I saw in the mid-2010s/early 2020s that really played with the Twitter format. Twitter was a defining aspect of many people's online life during that period, and we saw an explosion of generative art Twitter bots (in large part because of easily accessible tools like Tracery and Cheap Bots Done Quick). There were also lots of people doing other interesting things with fiction in ways that relied on the Twitter/microblogging format. One example that springs to mind is Johannes T. Evans's tweetfics; his stories often started as a tweet that reads as an off-the-cuff story concept, but then in the following thread he would gradually develop it into a full piece of fiction. Another example is when Heather Flowers made a Twitter thread that was a byzantine labyrinth of interconnected quote tweets. I think it's so cool when artists make a piece of art that really plays with the medium like that.

As AI usage becomes more common, I wonder if we'll see more web art being created that does interesting things with a chatbot interface. Chatbots are increasingly becoming an everyday aspect of navigating the internet in the 2020s, even if you don't willingly engage with ChatGPT or the like. Every corporate website these days seems to have a customer support chatbot. Many of us are pushed by our employers to use AI chatbots. Even if we personally are able to abstain, the internet is increasingly full of the products of other people's AI chats. The Twitter format was extensively used for web art in the 2010s/early 2020s, and I think it's possible that the chatbot format could end up being used for a similar purpose by artists as we move into the late 2020s.

On the other hand, though-- maybe not. Twitter had a few unique qualities that AI chatbots don't have:

  • Twitter was a social platform, so when you made art there, you were placing the art within a social environment where it was natural for other people to interact with it. An AI chatbot is basically taking the place of human social interaction, so it doesn't exist in the same kind of social context that was useful for artists on Twitter.
  • I think most great art that's in conversation with a particular medium comes from artists who use that medium a lot. People creating art on Twitter were typically also extremely active on Twitter as everyday users, which made them intimately familiar with the format. When I think of people making cool online art today, I doubt whether any of them are using AI chatbots regularly (for good reason!). And I suspect that heavy users of AI are not as likely to put a lot of time and effort into art that critiques or plays with the medium of chatbots, when they could just get the chatbot to produce some slop for them. Maybe that's an unfair generalization, but personally I haven't seen any examples that convince me otherwise. So you kind of have two mostly non-overlapping groups: one with the interest and expertise to make art that plays with a technological medium in an interesting way, and another with the experience of what it's like to spend vast amounts of time interacting with a chatbot.

In any case, I'll be interested to see if/how this area of web art develops further. If you know of any cool non-AI art that incorporates or comments on the chatbot format in some way, I'd love to hear about it!