3 Make Something That Makes Something

Twitterbots have the potential to do wild and wonderful things, from cracking jokes to making us think, but when all you can see is their outputs, it can be hard to visualize what's going on under the hood. Later in this book, we begin to build our own Twitterbots from the ground up, gluing each piece together and applying a nice coat of paint to make them shine. Before we begin, though, it is useful to think for a moment about the theory of Twitterbots and generative machinery more generally. We come across generators every day, from machines that assign school places and hospital appointments to the algorithms that drop candy from the sky in the games on our phones. In this chapter, we think about what separates one generator from another and how to think about generative software in terms of the whole of its outputs, and not just one or two examples.