Over Thanksgiving weekend, Facebook equipped its employees with “Liam,” a chatbot that would spit out PR talking points for employees to mouth when family members asked sensitive questions about their employer, according to the New York Times. Now, a manager at Google has created a bot that throws some major shade at the ridiculous Liam bot.
An employee can tell Facebook’s Liam bot what Uncle Joe just asked about Facebook’s history of privacy violations, and the bot will spit out nonanswers, like: “Facebook invests millions every year to preserve the privacy of our users.”
But Google senior manager Adrienne Porter Felt’s version of the bot spits out Facebook PR answers for all kinds of questions one might hear over the holidays. Like this:
added some more responses from congressional testimony. is this….AI? pic.twitter.com/Lh2i8bFMkk
— Adriana Porter Felt (@__apf__) December 3, 2019
“Holiday conversations are often fraught, and I love the idea of a bot responding in stilted corp speak,” Felt told me in a Twitter DM. She says she is trying to find the time to write more helpful questions and answers and is open to suggestions.
After the Times broke the story about Facebook’s bot on Monday, Feld was quick on the trigger and had her satirical version of Liam done within hours.
Here’s my favorite answer suggestion from Felt’s bot:
