How far are you willing to go in the race for internet popularity? Would you buy a €1 lottery ticket for a shot at 25,000 new followers?

As you're sitting there in a poorly lit office in front of your MacBook Air screen, perpetually hopscotching from one text-filled vessel for banner advertising to the next, absorbing the media, so is ContentBot. As you're socially sharing the most compelling images, videos, and personal essays that you find, in service of furthering your personal brand, so is ContentBot.

A bot created by a group of artists spent the last few months selecting items at random from a Silk Road-style darknet marketplace, buying them with Bitcoin, and having them shipped to a gallery in Switzerland. After the it bought some ecstasy pills and a counterfeit passport, we asked: How will authorities deal with the complex legal and moral issue of a piece of artificial intelligence breaking the law? It turns out, the answer was simple: just arrest the computer.

Once a week for several months, a bot created by a group of artist-hackers purchased one item selected at random from Agora, a Silk Road-style darknet marketplace, and had it delivered to an art gallery in Switzerland. In November, the bot bought a packet of ecstasy pills that were hidden inside a DVD box, and last month, it picked a forged Hungarian passport. Who committed a crime?

If the likes of Tolstoy and Beethoven are to be believed, art is important in part because it speaks to some essential humanity shared by creator and beholder. On Tumblr, artist Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is figuring out what happens when the beholder is less "human" than "reasonably smart piece of software."

This is a scene from an episode of Friends written by a bot called the Infinite Friends Machine.