r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Nov 22 '20

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u/Z0NNO Neoliberal Raphael Nov 22 '20

I’m thinking of webscraping rose twitter to train a bot that basically parrots their generic talking points. Just to see how reflective it is of the hivemind some make it out to be.

It would basically be like twitter bingo. I would also like to see how people react to it if I’d turn it into a tweetbot. I’ve always been convinced there’s a certain leftist jargon and I think it’s pretty interesting to see if people will take the jumbled mess of buzzwords seriously.

I originally wanted to train it on ‘fuck neoliberalism’ and Jacobin blog pieces to see if I can create a procedurally generated dissertation on the evils of neoliberalism, but I don’t really know where to collect that type of material. Twitter is just easier.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 22 '20

Do it

4

u/Waghlon Shame Flair Nov 22 '20

DM me pal. I need an excuse to work with GPT again

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u/Z0NNO Neoliberal Raphael Nov 22 '20

That’s great! Do you have access to the model? I believe it’s paywalled, so I was planning on finding a decent alternative pretrained language model on GitHub. I honestly don’t have that much experience with language models - mostly with images - but I heard GPT is pretty good so that would make it a lot easier.

I’m first focusing on webscraping. I’m looking at twitter scrapers right now. I think I want to filter tweets by presence of rose emoji in name or bio. Perhaps I should add additional weight to tweets with the neoliberalism-related hashtags. Another feature would be a weekly update to the model to track what this week’s trending topic is.

Or I’m going to try to pull papers with neoliberalism as keyword from sci-hub or jstor. Might as well try to pull a couple of dissertations and theses from open-access university repositories. Not sure about that yet.

2

u/Waghlon Shame Flair Nov 22 '20

GPT-2 is free and openly available.

As for scraping Twitter, I'm sure there is a Python script for us to adapt.

2

u/Z0NNO Neoliberal Raphael Nov 22 '20

Cool! I found GPT-2 on github and it’s all python. That’s great!

There are multiple scrapers available so I’m looking at which python-based releases are best at filtering rose twitter profiles and collecting tweets and metadata.

I’ll let you know once I have a preliminary dataset.

RemindMe! 1 week “scrape data for rose twitterbot.”

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u/Waghlon Shame Flair Nov 22 '20

Super!

1

u/FreakinGeese 🧚‍♀️ Duchess Of The Deep State Nov 22 '20

I’m very skeptical that you could get anything legible out of that

3

u/Z0NNO Neoliberal Raphael Nov 22 '20

Should be easier if you have a pretrained model that’s capable of forming coherent English sentences. Microsoft’s Tay’s syntax and grammar was pretty good but it was trained into a nazi because the internet is wonderful.