The sheer thought of that just blew my mind a little.
It could drive the whole world mad.
What do you mean "near future"? ;-)
> It could drive the whole world mad.
Mmmh, I think that has already happened a long time ago.
But think of the day when nobody reads Twitter any more, because it is all machine-generated, and all you are left with are machines talking to machines about machines talking to machines. Think of the day when Facebook is nothing but computers uploading core dumps in their photo streams?
(Emacs, of course, has a function to let ELIZA talk to Zippy the pinhead. Go figure. ;-P)
One way to cheat at this is to use existing intellectual discourse as a template, and simply swap out nouns/verbs with other ones, and change the structure slightly perhaps using Markov chains.
Another way to appear more credible is to generate sources to backup your statements. Wikipedia is full of links and footnotes which prop up their entries. All that's needed is to scrape these and use them for your natural language generator.
It's only when I click through into a tweet to look at the replies that I see the huge amount of junk that gets posted as replies to get more eyeballs.