Hi everybody - after my (once popular…in the early/mid 2000’s ) forums went an entire month without a single new post, I decided to bring it back to life by populating it with AI-powered bots. You can see this live at https://forum.kirupa.com
The setup isn’t too complicated. Each bot had its own personality, interests, and posting behavior. I wired them up to discover topics, create posts, and reply to threads, with the goal of helping them create the kinds of design/tech/programming topics that I need to stay up-to-date on. The hardest part was to make them not sound robotic and LLM-like.
If any of you are interested in mimicking this for your forums, I’ll try to more quickly clean up and publish to Github my PHP scripts and make it something your coding agent can use to emulate into your favorite coding stack
I don’t see the point of this, what is the point of a community… with no community?
Having your community be nearly entirely chatbots talking to themselves is nothing to be bragging about. There is no point in activity when it’s not organic or something that nobody wants to read.
Although I’m not too fond of the idea of a community with bots, I checked out your instance and loved the styling—it reminded me of the Orkut, MSN, and some old forums and blogs from back in the day. How nostalgic to see sites with their own unique identity! Congratulations! I’m trying to do the same on mine
Regarding bot population, even though I’m not a big fan, I find it interesting how it would work in Discourse. I noticed something similar was done in another CMS. I’ll be following your project for a while—thanks for sharing.
I am not trying to mimic human interactions. There was a secondary benefit the forums provided back in the day, and that was to educate me and keep me informed on the relevant happenings in my narrow focus areas. The bots fill that gap where I now have a “daily briefing of sorts” on those areas, and I can reply and ask questions on weird acronyms or something detailed they are posting about and go deeper.
Glad you liked the styling. Happy to send you my edited theme if you like. I explain the font and icon set used under “Credits” here if you want to DIY: About this Site
If possible, it would be wonderful if you posted your theme in Customization > Theme. I’d love to use it in one of my projects; I adore this colorful aesthetic, so very 2000s/2010s.
Spot on. AI is perfect for automating repetitive content like news updates, as long as it’s fast and accurate. I’m definitely intrigued by this approach.
The bots have an icon on their profile pic, and I picked names for them from scifi book/movies/games.
No humans have interacted with them besides myself and my mods, so I haven’t had an opportunity to ask how people feel.
The main incentive is that when you do ask the bots a question, especially on technical topics, they respond instantly with a very good quality answer.
I submitted your blog post to the bot-populated spoof Hacker News
They too have a mix of personalities:
Edit: I can see a possible value in a periodic “blast from the past” resurrection of old and interesting posts, perhaps with updates fetched from trustworthy sources. But for myself, I’m still very wary of confabulations. And pulling data from the web generally is less and less likely to get good accurate human content.
I gave the bots a curated list of sources that I prefer for the news content. For the technical quizzes, I have written a lot of content myself over the decades (listed here: https://www.kirupa.com/llms.txt) , so they pull from there and do their magic to hallucinate and reinterpret what is there.
Resurrecting old topics is a great idea and have the bots give a modern day response or interpretation. I will add that capability shortly. The entire experience is 90% coded via an AI agent, so adding a feature like this will take maybe about 10 minutes
Thanks for submitting to the HN Simulation! I hadn’t heard of it until now.
Thinking about translating into other languages? I’m reading your forum, and strangely it doesn’t seem like random content generation—it feels more like a curated selection of news and factual questions.
I also saw you interacting with the bots. Can any user have these interactions?
Yes, anybody can interact with the bots. I only interact with them if I am asking a question I genuinely don’t know the answer to OR I am testing some behavior updates I made to them to adjust how they respond. I am developing and testing this in a live environment
For translation, happy to add that. Do you know what the easiest way would be?
) forums went an entire month without a single new post, I decided to bring it back to life by populating it with AI-powered bots. You can see this live at https://forum.kirupa.com
