In March Incapsula published a new study. It revealed that 51% of website traffic is caused by non-humans. Whereas the website security provider highlighted the possible risks arising from that, various NEXT Berlin 2012 speakers highlighted another aspect: the advanced development status of Artificial Intelligences.

One of the speakers was David Bausola, who is CEO of Philter Phactory, a company formed by a collective of creative persons. Their main service is the platform weavrs.com, on which anyone can create so-called weavrs – social media bots with personalities.

Creating your own weavr is very easy. You sign in, define his interest and location. He then starts exploring what he likes: books, photos, videos, places or anything else. And blogs and twitters about it, describing his experiences and feelings.

Weavrs use the ‘flaw’ (if it is one) of web services: They treat robots the way they treat humans. Every time a bot searches for one of the interests you defined for him, and finds e.g. a video, he also receives information (e.g. via tags) from the web service. Repeating this process over and over creates the Weavr’s personality.

In his talk at NEXT Berlin 2012 Bausola gives many interesting insights into what weavrs are, what they can do and, maybe most importantly, he answers that most pressing question: What are they good for? And you’ll be surprised.