At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines.

The chatbots aren’t very good, but that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t proud of them anyway: “I guarantee you’re going to spend way more money than you want on this,” Marcus chuckled on stage.

But even though Facebook might want to sell itself as the pioneer of chatbots, the real leaders in the field aren’t working in the AI research teams of silicon valley; they’re collaborating at events like last week’s BotSummit in the V&A, or this weekend’s Art of Bots exhibition in Somerset House. Move over chatbots: it’s time to meet the artbots.

BotSummit, now in its fourth year but held outside the US for the first time, is the creation of internet artist Darius Kazemi, whose medium he describes as “bots and generators and other weird internet stuff”. Kazemi has become particularly famous for his Twitterbots – single-purpose accounts on the social network with names like TwoHeadlines and Glitch Logos.

Kazemi describes the former, typical of his early work, as “an attempt to kill a certain kind of joke” – specifically, the waggish concept of mistaking two pieces of news for one unified story, exclaiming something along the lines of “I can’t believe the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge took out an injunction to stop the press reporting on their trip to India!”

TwoHeadlines uses Google News to make the same joke automatically, stripping out the object of one headline and replacing it with the object of another – and then doing it again, and again, and again. The account has made the same basic joke almost 21,000 times in two and a half years, though it hasn’t yet stopped people making the joke themselves.

Glitch Logos is a more visual project, taking the logos of world-renowned brands and randomly corrupting them. It’s inspired by another well-known bot artist, Allison Parrish, and her bot Smiling Face Withface, which posts similarly corrupted images of emoji to Tumblr.

Parrish is the artist behind perhaps the most famous artbot to date, Everyword, which launched on Twitter in 2007 and promptly began tweeting every word in the English language, from A to Z (and then a little further, to É). It finished its task in 2014.

Both Parrish and Kazemi have exhibits at this weekend’s Art of Bots exhibition, run by digital culture festival Abandon New Devices (AND) and curated by British-Colombian Matthew Plummer-Fernandez – another BotSummit attendee.

Plummer-Fernandez spoke about how the artbot world needed to move beyond easy and obvious platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and make algorithmic art that could spread on more obscure or less generalist mediums. His latest project, Shiv Intiger, introduced at the V&A Museum, is one example of that.

This project, a co-creation with Julien Deswaef, lives on Thingiverse, a site for sharing models for 3D printers. The bot scans the site for freely licensed 3D models, and randomly smashes them together, producing bizarre mixtures of machine parts, toys and artistic objects.

Partially inspired by the Japanese videogame Katamari Damacy, the bot then uploads its creations back to Thingiverse, and tagging in the original creators of its constituent parts. The artists point out that this hasn’t been received well by the community: “The bot has been running anonymously since February, receiving hundreds of complaints and online harassment from the Thingiverse community, amid a few fans responding with poetry and defending its rights,” they say.

Not every artbot needs to live online, though. The physical objects printed from Shiv Integer’s files will be displayed at the AND exhibition, and another artist exhibiting at the gallery, Sam Lavigne, has built “Parliament Live”, a bot that creates video art.

It downloads videos from the UK parliament at random, Lavigne says, “then transcribes that video and analyses which words were spoken most frequently. Using that analysis, the bot generates a new cut of the video containing only the top keywords.”

“The goal is to create a kind of surrealistic insight into the happenings of politics, highlighting language patterns and the tedium and rhetoric of governing,” Lavigne adds.

The Art of Bots exhibition is open at Somerset House on 15 and 16 April. BotSummit 2016 is over, but the event can be viewed on YouTube.