Updated: Our Conversation With @Tofu_Product, an Insane Twitter Bot We Don’t Think Is Really a Bot

Meet @tofu_product. It claims to be an account that will mimic the way you write. It apparently works by going through your tweets and pulling random words, phrases, and hashtags and slapping them together.  It might just be that we were recently burned by @Horse_eBooks, but we’re not entirely convinced @tofu_product is real. Here’s our “conversation.”

Update: Creator of the @tofu_product bot has reached out to us to assure us the bot is real. You can read the full update here.

We tried tweeting at @tofu_product from the official Geekosystem Twitter account yesterday, but got no response. That has us a little suspicious of its authenticity, but earlier this week I chatted with tofu from my personal account. Here’s how that went:

The response has nothing to do with my question, but it’s not designed to answer questions. It just tries to mimic your writing style. This response pulls from a joke I tweeted earlier this month:

That’s how @tofu_product works. It just seems to take random bits of other tweets. The weird conversation continued:

There are more, but you get the idea. @tofu_product’s random assemblage of words and phrases from past tweets results in some truly insane tweets of its own. The thing is, we’re not convinced it isn’t another @Horse_eBooks situation where it’s just a person pretending to be a bot.

The tweet responses don’t come instantaneously. At times there were gaps of about ten minutes between responses. The last tweet from @tofu_product came days after the initial conversation. A bot that’s doing this could probably go through a Twitter feed and put random nonsense together instantly. It would likely take a human a few minutes.

It doesn’t expressly state that @tofu_product is a bot, but from the description “Tofu absorbs flavor. Follow me, then tweet at me; I’ll try my best to write like you do. Created by @jtoscano42” we think that “bot” is a safe assumption to make.

@Jtoscano42 is Joe Toscano whose profile says “Programming and music production. AKA ZhayTee, Voobr, Vir Heroicus. Creator of @tofu_product.” We reached out to Toscano on Twitter and will update when and if we get a response.

To be clear, we’re not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing it @tofu_product is just a person putting nonsense together from ours tweets. We love nonsense, and “I’m currently obsessed with getting floppy,” is a tremendously weird sentence we’re glad exists in the world. We’d just like to know where it came from, and we don’t want to get Horse_eBooked again.

(via @Tofu_product)

Meanwhile in related links

• Horse_eBooks and Pronunciation Book were the same people
• It was all weird performance art that we saw with our own eyes
• The people behind it were jerks, but then felt bad about being jerks

Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com

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Glen Tickle

Glen is a comedian, writer, husband, and father. He won his third-grade science fair and is a former preschool science teacher, which is a real job.

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