Calling @OtherMichael new project for you…
I love that cartoon, but I can never find it on google. What’s the title?
Bots are powerful, but when actual human beings act pretty much the same, retweeting false info just to be “first,” who needs them?
See also: the (non-Amazon) Mechanical Turk.
What if someone teaches a bot to constantly make offers for dubious penis enlargement therapies and send out Spanish-prisoner scams? Our means of communication will be rendered irrecoverably useless overnight! Oh wait.
Actually, hasn’t the inevitable and complete demise of Twitter already been forecast?
Of course computers will be better shitposters than I am. They’re better at chess, too, but I still play out of love for the game.
Also you’re all Hitler.
You know who else loved chess? Hitler.
I keep forgetting about antipope then I get reminded and lose hours. I’ve been enjoying Hugh’s posts and the resultant comment threads. Antipope is always good reading.
To me, it seems like this kind of behavior could serve just to energize the evolution of online forums past the universal/passive stage. Anyone who believes that a completely open, self-running internet forum can be a place of real discussion is lazing about in the garden of eden. Bot swarms are just the serpent forcing them to take a bite already. The internet is communication infrastructure that closes distances between people, that’s pretty much it. The rest, in terms of creating discussions worth having, is up to the humans.
The OP also laments the idea that people are forced to respond to bots, thereby “wasting” their time. I’d argue that some of the finest, most lucid things I’ve read on the bbs have been in response to trolls/turfers swinging through and dropping a little turd. Only the latest example
Using Twitter as an example of internet communication vulnerability is like saying that global food security is at risk because cheese gets melty if you leave it out in the sun. It’s a bot playground, as the bar to seeming “real” is so low. As many of the commenters on the OP site said, many real people on twitter are about as helpful as a half-baked bot anyway. If you told me today that it had originally been built as a bot field-of-dreams, developed as a meta-troll just to accelerate the development of troll bots, I’d shrug agnostically.
On its own, a bot probably can’t argue convincingly enough to replace a human in, say, a Reddit thread on gender politics.
Sure you’re setting the bar low enough there? An encephalopathic baboon could replace most of the humans in Reddit threads on gender politics.
Actually, I’m not 100% sure they haven’t already done so.
I’ve seen BB try to be responsible with image attribution. Wonder why it wasn’t included here?
Hmmm. What we need is an attribution bot. Beats the takedown bot in my mind.
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