Artificial Intelligence Online

On IRC, you get used to stretch your definition of the word "person". Every "man" or "woman" is actually not more than a name on your screen. Some of the names may represent people that have gone to get themselves a pizza, or even fallen asleep and left the computer on and connected, and they're going to pay for it (unless they're students, who never pay for anything). But some of these names are not even that - they're just programs someone intentionally left working and connected. Those are called Robots, or bots, or ots, or ts. The reasons for making a bot are various and generally very obscure. Nobody, for example, could really justify the existence of the annoying bot Ricci, except its ability to tell exactly how long has it been since he/she/it has seen any of the bunch, using the word "seen." If she doesn't know the person, she says "I do not know [whatever the name you typed was]", which lead to a lot of powerfully corny jokes like "Seen any good movies?" ("I don't know any good movies"), "Seen how to tie my shoelaces?" ("I don't know how to tie my shoelaces"), "Seen anything at all?" ("Go to hell I'm not that stupid"), etc. Other annoying features include saying "hye" to anyone entering the channel (gives you a feeling you're being cared for), responding to the words "how are you" with a randomly generated stupid answer, and setting the channel topic to "For fans of Christina Ricci" or to "Bittersweet Chocolate is better than nothing" every once in a while for no apparent reason. Yes, you got it, it's totally useless. Boy are we net guys bored.