About Lorem Ipscream

Lorem Ipscream is an experiment in the creation of generative information. Creating mere facimilies of authenticity, Lorem Ipscream offers delicious flavors of deception, including one that generates emo song lyrics, and another that creates entriely forged identities. As it is essentially just a tool, the performance art aspect will come with how the community of web developers, hackers, and general lurkers use it.

Process

Most of the bulk text generative algorithms use a Markov chain-model to statistically reconstruct samples of text based upon the structure of the original text; such sources were usually from Project Gutenberg. In the instance of non-trivial flavors, like Sailing Three Tuesdays and Neapolitician, I wrote a scraper that parsed websites for such information. So far, I've collected the inaugural addresses of every president, and about 23,000 punk and emo song lyrics.

The most complicated flavor by far is Soylent Cream, the identity generator. Using census information about name prevelance, I constructed a statistically acurate model for American names for men and women. For the address, I scraped a large database of street names according to zip code, and then used a reverse-lookup to associate zips to respective cities and states. Social security numbers follow all official standards, giving accurate ranges and excluding the 9 or so blacklisted numbers and any patterns not in circulation.

The result is an actual, traceable address, legitimate SSN, and a name that most likely corresponds to some person in the world. Because such care has been put into this model, the generated models are nearly impossible to distinguish from real identities, and so pass a very critical turing test to that regard.