Twitter makes humans look like bots

The advances in artificial intelligence and the rise of businesses that develop and employ chat-based bots mean that it gets increasingly hard to know whether you are dealing with a machine or a human being. The technology behind bots has gotten so sophisticated that it can require a longer conversation in order to be sure that there is no person of flesh and blood on the other end, as illustrated in this exchange with a Google support “employee” which I linked to in yesterday’s reading list. Basically, one has to run somewhat of a freestyle Turing Test. In other cases, the opposite happens: Users assume they are interacting with a machine, but in fact are having a chat with a real-human who only pretends to be a bot. An “Anti-Turing-Test”, as conducted in this example with Facebook’s experimental personal assistant M, can reveal this.

Bots pretending to be humans, humans pretending to be bots – sounds a bit bizarre, doesn’t it? Here is something else bizarre:

Think about what’s typical for a contemporary chatbot, those being used by large companies for customer service such as in the example above by Google, or by telecom operators (I recently had a chat interaction with T-Mobile which made me suspicious that I was conversing with a machine pretending to be a human):  

• Their messages seem prefabricated, built from pre-existing content blocks.
• They are predictable, especially after you had a longer conversation with them.
• They sometimes fail to fully address the inquiry, especially if it’s complex.
• They don’t get irony and don’t respond well to nor have humor.
• They usually don’t write long text but stick to 1 or 2 sentences at once.

Now, don’t you know this from somewhere?

Yep, this is a quite accurate description of what’s going on on Twitter. And I am not referring to the actual bots that are populating the service. I am referring to real humans. To some extend, Twitter, with its 140 character limit and its encouragement of instantness and impulsive comments, has turned its users into bot-like creatures, who keep tweeting the same lines, the same reactions, the same ideas, the same arguments. If you are a Twitter user and don’t believe this, just type “[often used word(s)] from:yourusername” into Twitter search. Looking at my own results was pretty uncomfortable.

Sure, there is more humor and irony on Twitter than what you can expect from the encounter with a customer service bot. But only among a subset of users. And only as long as the discussion doesn’t touch sensitive topics such as [enter random object of outrage]. If that happens, everyone sticks to their pre-fabricated text blocks and appears to follow a very narrow conversation protocol.

The root cause of this is obviously not Twitter, but the human mind. Conversations on Facebook or other text-based Social Media platforms sometimes also look like strange interactions between bots. But the 140 character limit of Twitter forces people into a corset which makes it hard not to appear like a bot; to be unpredictable, to be sophisticated, to acknowledge complexity, to maintain a sense of humor.

Twitter recently announced that it will raise the character limit. In my opinion, it’s the right move. In a time in which bots get constantly better in imitating humans, there is nothing to gain with a service which makes humans in public look like bots.

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