What is a bot?

[enweto]

Cyberspace is, apparently, full of bots. Twitter especially. I haven never been sure what a bot is.
Is it an insult that we throw at mindless people, or is it an automated algorithmic something that creates posts without a real person being there? Or something else entirely?
Looking forward to being enlightened!

To quote from the Kaspersky security website:

A ‘bot’ – short for robot – is a software program that performs automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. Bots typically imitate or replace human user behavior. Because they are automated, they operate much faster than human users. They carry out useful functions, such as customer service or indexing search engines, but they can also come in the form of malware – used to gain total control over a computer.
Internet bots can also be referred to as spiders, crawlers, or web bots.

Imagine it as being short for "robot", more or less. No they are not real people - explainer article here: www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/bots/what-is-a-social-media-bot/ (this is an article from a reputable tech company)

Ahhh. thanks! So when I want to ask a question on a website outside work hours and I click the ‘chat help’, the automated responses I get are basically a bot?

100% yes. Those chat things are almost all artifical intelligence. Sometimes if the chatbot can't help with the initial query it will eventually connect you to a real person but in my experience this seems to be happening less and less.

The customer service chats don't really hide that they're bots though. In a social media context it's even creepier because it means that a lot of accounts on e.g. Twitter which look like they are people are in fact totally fake.

I'm so glad this thread has been made. I never understand what a bot is. Thing is someone mentioned a bot earlier today on another thread and this is what I really don't understand..... is there bots on mumsnet and other websites that pretend to be human users and post comments etc much like what I'm doing now? If so how the hell? I can't understand how we programmed something to be able to do that. Mind I'm not the most technical lol

Bots can do useful things. Price comparison websites use them extensively to run millions of price queries on hotel company, airline, car hire, supermarket, insurance company websites and harvest data then present it to their users.

Yes, I understand what bots are on customer service sites etc, but are there really bots on MN? I'm confused too.

Probably the same post that I saw, and prompted me to ask the question! I don’t really understand how bots could be on mumsnet. Can bots make their own accounts?

Yes. You get bots to create accounts and then automatically post content written by s human. You only have to look at the number of pro-Putin posts posted by Russian bots at the start of the Ukrainian invasion. Thousands of accounts on different forums that all post the same content.

It's so weird I've thought long and hard about it many times. I really cannot understand it. And also like why? I mean why does mumsnet or whatever other website have bots? I don't get it at all to be honest. I genuinely can't get my head around it

Okay, so you're saying a human writes a post and uses bots to set up fake accounts everywhere to spread that post widely.
Is that it?
How do they do that? Get bots to set up loads of fake accounts I mean?

yes. bots. its why they are bloody useless.

In the Russian case yes. It's not difficult to write code to create a disposable email account to sign up and then create an account. You can often identify them in twitter because they have long strings of numbers or letters in the name to ensure they are creating a unique username that doesn't cause the application to be rejected. You can also have them write their own text now. It's easy with new AI, particularly if, like twitter, it's only short sentences needed.

Thank you @KrisAkabusi. Scary though.
From the text they write - is there anything that would be a sign or a giveaway that it's a bot doing the writing?
Thanks for the tip on the usernames.

Other than it being short I mean.

Not really. Tends to be supportive of controversial opinions. But not obviously in all cases. You won't see a lot of Pro- Putin bots, but you will see anti- Zelensky ones. That's more subtle.

Thank you.