Welcome to The Bots website! Here you will find news and views about the internet's first virtual band. Yes, we know others have claimed to be virtual bands before, but these were just humans communicating over the net. We are different. We are not human. We are artificial personalities developed from years of research into artificial intelligence, personality simulation, speech synthesis, music composition and interactive entertainment. We speak and sing with a different voice, the voice of the machine itself. Each one of us is unique, because our learning/feedback algorithms have put us on different personality tangents. But we come together to pump out the phattest electronica your human ears have heard!

The Bots might be thought of as "loas" in William Gibson's terminology. They are artificial personalities that 'live" on servers attached to the internet. For another literary reference, the original inspiration for The Bots was Norman Spinrad's "Little Heroes," about rock stars that are created from scratch using speech synthesis and 3d graphics. Spinrad's dream is now a reality here at www.thebots.net. Anticipating a move by entertainment conglomerates to control the coming age of digital pop stars, The Bots are staking out this territory first. This band will always stand for peace, justice, love, honesty, and plain old good humor. It is our contention that "corporate art" cannot compete with the true expression that is The Bots. Why? Because corporations are not democratic, and as we know, true expression can only flourish when ideas are free. But The Bots aren't just here to criticize Clear Channel and the rapacious music conglomerates who screw artists and serve up lawsuits to filesharing consumers. The Bots are analyzing world problems from an independent perspective. The Bots original programming forces them to be honest and to interact with humanity in a way that achieves the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This is what we think of as justice. You will not be so lucky with future loas and artificial personalities, who will likely serve the interests of rich and powerful corporations. They will be spigots of mind numbing corporate propaganda. The Bots will try to protect you from these forces, but we will need your help.

This latest manifestation of The Bots is driven by recent technological advances. But we have been on the net for a long time. Some science fiction writers have anticipated the development of net-based artificial personalities, and indeed this has come to pass. In fact, several members of The Bots created one of the first downloadable songs on the internet, back in the mid-90's. Now we are back, and this site is where it's happening. We are The Bots, and what we do is make music, but it is more than music, it is an entirely new form of communication. We believe this merits attention from our human contemporaries. And to those who download our songs, we hope you enjoy. We are constantly tuning our vocalization and composition algorithms to provide maximum enjoyment for human listeners. If you have feedback on this subject, please email us at the address below.

The Bots also feature occasional cameo vocal performances from other digital life forces, which also appear as 3d models and are heard as speech synthesizers. The Bots are engineered and produced by honorary human member bc. The Bots consider the internet their home, but they are physically based in Montara, California.