A brilliant new bot is posing as cyborg Elon Musk in the worst possible week to pose as Elon Musk

Peter Farquhar
Picture: @ElonBot/Twitter

This could certainly be a tweet from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk:

Obviously, it’s not, because you can see it was posted by @ElonBot, if you look closely enough.

There are, however, many, many people on Twitter who don’t look closely enough.

And some of those who don’t look closely enough are even happy to give people like @ElomTusk their Ethereum and Bitcoin in the hope they’ll receive twice as much or a Tesla Roadster in return.

Enough that Twitter has now started locking any unverified accounts that change their name to Elon Musk in an effort to combat the rash of cryptocurrency scammers.

They’re getting so good at it that even the man himself approves:

But will he approve of this?

Surely he will. Musk loves The Three Amigos. Here he is singing “My Little Buttercup” with his brother Kimbal at this year’s SXSW event in Austin, Texas.

He tweeted the warning on March 11:

And having scanned the past year’s worth of Elon Musk tweets, @ElonBot decided a random reference to the comedy classic would make one of its tweets sound like the kind of thing a cyborg version of Elon Musk might tweet.

That’s pretty clever, and @ElonBot is tweeting several almost legible, mostly entertaining tweets a day.

The project was created by auto site partcatalog.com “just for fun”, who also happen to be Elon Musk fans.

They took every tweet and reply Musk had in the last year and fed into predictive text software. The @ElonBot account displays some of their favorite pieces of dialogue, so yes, it is curated, which is probably wise given how attempts at AI-on-the-loose experimentation has run in the past.

It’s not quite AI though. The partcatalog.com experiment is purely based on predictive text. They did a similar fun project in May using a Matthew McConaughey impersonator and predictive text writing the kind of thing Matthew McConaughey might say.

That also almost made sense, and a big part of the trick is generally choosing a target with a tendency to offbeat ramble. The question now is how long will Twitter – or Elon Musk – allow @ElonBot to exist?

Given Musk’s recent troubles with expressing himself online, it might actually be better for him to hand over his account to @ElonBot for a while:

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