Aiku is moving to a new home.
(because Elon Musk is being a pain in the butt).
tl;dr: Aiku is moving from Twitter to Mastodon.
Nearly a year ago, I created a small bot called Aiku. Aiku could generate a haiku-like poem for you, given two words as input. It’s based on the now-wildly popular GPT-3 model.
Since I didn’t want to have to manually generate poems myself to see them, I also created a Twitter bot. It’s a tiny Python script that takes two random words, generates a poem and tweets it. Every day, at 12 AM GMT, it posts one poem and goes back to sleep.
Sadly, this week, Twitter has decided that it’s not going to allow people to use its API AT ALL without getting paid themselves first. This is weird, bad and funnily hypocritical coming from the guy who was talking about open-sourcing the recommendation algorithm a few months ago. The news made me sad. The bot doesn’t have many followers, but seeing it keep working on its weird poems was a nice moment of my day almost every day.
Coming to Twitter’s API, unsurprisingly, it’s a pain in the ass to use. As a developer, I expect an API to be actually usable without talking to hundreds of support people. There are 2 versions of the Twitter API, and there isn’t an easy way to determine which one you’re supposed to use. I assumed that posting a tweet would be basic enough functionality to be in both the versions, so I went with the version that my client library seemed to support. Sadly, I later found that the version I chose did not actually allow you to tweet. Then, when I moved to the other version, Twitter told me that they needed me to talk with them before they’d actually allow me to post tweets.
So, all in all, it wasn’t a fun experience, especially with me coming from a different API company, where developer experience is literally paramount. Now that they expect me to pay to post a tweet, I’ve moved Aiku off Twitter and into Mastodon. I’m hosting a personal mastodon instance where I will (and you can) follow Aiku as it continues posting a poem every day.
Now, the funniest thing I saw this week was this tweet:
I wonder if Elon Musk seriously thinks that people will pay a 100 USD per month for the Twitter API, which is below par on almost any axis you judge APIs on. I wish he’d go back to building his rockets and cars. Never meet your heroes, friends.
Side note: A lot of other bot owners are pissed and removing their bots from Twitter too. Here’s one of the most popular ones: @year_progress
Either ways, I was thinking about hosting a personal mastodon for a while now, so thanks Elon, I guess, for finally making me do it.