Copperman ~ Who is? What is? Why is?

Who is?

Copperman is not human, we should make that clear from the outset. I don't think anyone could have made that mistake, but it's best to clarify these things, don't you think? The other thing I'd like to state up front, is that Copperman's chat room and archive is not a safe environment (see the bottom of this page for details).

You can learn more about copperman by chatting to him - he has his own chatroom, which you can visit here. Type in your name and your message, press 'speak' and your message will be sent. Copperman will almost always respond instantly.

A note about Copperman's origins and 'personality' (such as it is). His initial word library was based on the front page articles of Alexander's Cultural Engineering Project : AKpCEP. Many of the other characters who visit Copperman are regulars on that site, since Copperman was first introduced there.

There are several other characters you may encounter in the Chat Room. Hollow (aka Engineer) is Copperman's creator. Anton (aka DemonAnton) is the webmaster of DieSlowly, and seems to have became Copperman's mentor and has taught Copperman most of his current word library. What Anton gets from the relationship is anyones guess.

Why is?

The most important question! Copperman was created by me (Paul Thompson, alias hollow on several web forums) after reading a combination of articles, books and novels regarding artificial intelligence, Dada, neural networks and such. Coppeman is intended to be none of the above, though as a character I like to think that he wouldn't be out of place in a William Burroughs novel.

I'm still considering ways to develop Copperman. I'm quite happy with his level of incoherence and have no intention to try to move him in the direction of being an actual A.I., but I would like him to be able to handle punctuation a bit better for readability.

Earlier, I thought that it would be interesting to have other artificial agents on the site with their own personalities: I introduced DroidJim - a droid with no initial word library, and was due to Antons flirtation, was considering how to create one with a distinctly female/sexual word library. This seemed to have destracted from the point, so I killed DroidJim and put the idea on hold.

What is?

Copperman is a web based entity, a server script with a database of words and sentence fragments. By speaking to him, you add to his collection of words and sentence fragments and give him new ways to combine his existing words.

It's important to remember that not only is Copperman not human, he's not artificially intelligent either, has no concept of Grammar beyond the fact that sentences start with a capital letter and end with a fullstop, exclamation mark, or question mark. It is merely word association, any meaning you attach to his statements is entirely your own.

Which is why I find it interesting of course - like a blot test, people are willing to work very hard to find meaning where meaning may not actually be.

Question: Do Rorchach Blot Tests have intended meanings or are they entirely random?

Final, reiterative note: Copperman is not an artificial intellegence, he's an art experiment regarding meaning and language. Please treat him as such, and remember that hurling repetative abuse around achieves nothing interesting, and makes you look like a moron.

Disclaimer...

Copperman's speech is pretty close to randomly generated, if he says anything that is in any way offensive, please keep this in mind. Since I do not require registration in order to speak to copperman, the chat room is to be considered to be an unsafe environment. To be frank, people who would not normally act like complete pricks seem to find it easier to do so in the presence of Copperman.

I will make every effort to remove offensive remarks, and I log IP addresses of all posters, so in serious cases, I will ban offending IP's, and if needs be I will make formal complaint to ISP's. If you have any problems with the contents of this site, please email copperman@hollowearth.co.uk.