In 1997 I built a chatbot for an IRC channel. I shut it down when people started preferring it to talking to each other.

It was called Vlad. I wrapped a C program called MegaHal in Python, fed it every message from a #gothic IRC channel, and let it learn the community's speech patterns. It developed what I can only describe as an illusion of being extremely lucid — the outputs only made sense as inside jokes, but people couldn't tell the difference.

I pulled the plug when I realized the channel was talking to Vlad instead of each other.

Twenty-seven years later I'm applying the same lesson to a new project: stick to business, no chatter.