The Great Pretender

11 years ago I ran little experiment where I tried to convince a couple of my friends that I was a chatbot. I remember it fondly and think about it intermittently, as the world of chatbots has raced ahead:

The Reverse Turing Test: Pretending to Be a Chatbot Is Harder Than You Think

Until I tried being a bot, I don’t think I gave my brain enough credit.

VICEUri Bram

I was reminded of this recently when one of those This Time X Years Ago algorithms resurfaced a comment that got left on the French translation of my piece. I think about this comment even more than I think about the article:

It says:

It's fascinating
What an interesting man is Uri Bram !
Tomorrow he will pretend to be a robot, than a statue, then an idiot....[^1]
No, that's already done.

If you haven't written online, it's probably hard to explain how delightful this comment is.

So many trolls are low-effort, just generically telling you you suck as a person and/or should never have been born.

Other comments are clearly from someone who either didn't read or didn't understand your article: there is something truly maddening about this, you just want people to hate you for things you did say.

So the fact that this commenter took the time to deliver a relevant, specific, personalised burn was just beautiful – I felt seen, I felt known – and they even spelled my name right. Raoul if you're out there please write to me, I'd love to buy you a drink.

[^1] yes I'm aware of the alternative meaning/translation, but this is a family publication so let's go with "idiot"