Ashton Kutcher Launches Gossip Blog

Not content to just make terrible films and older women, Ashton Kutcher is getting into the gossip market with a new blog called Blahgirls. The site offers a relatively light-hearted take on traditional celebrity gossip, lacking the nastiness of bloggers like Perez Hilton and the infuriating stalking of print outlets like US Weekly.

The blog is “written” by three animated teenage girls (that look like scraps from the South Park cutting room floor), who also star in short video posts in which they discuss celebrity news and gossip in a ridiculous caricature of what 13-year-old girls sound like.

What makes the site interesting, however, is that comments and e-mails from readers are replied to by the characters: Britney, Krystle, and Tiffany. Many of the responses come not from ghost writers or blog staff, but from an automated chat bot that generates replies and posts them without any input from a person. Believable artificial intelligence of this type is notoriously hard to implement, but as more and more custom responses are generated by the development team, the bot will become more… human, or at least that’s what Kutcher hopes, according to an interview he conducted with the New York Times earlier this week.

People want their celebrity gossip, we guess. We’re just glad you’ll never see these newest members of the paparazzi chasing Britney Spears to her car. [From: NY Times and Blahgirls]

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