Ask HN: Is the word “bot” losing its meaning?
Yes. It is indeed losing its meaning.<p>This word has been abused to the point where it has become meaningless just like how I keep hearing the word &#x27;literally&#x27; used in every sentence. Even worse, it&#x27;s used carelessly as an insult to criticise others or used towards anyone who disagrees with them rather than describing the actual quick and automatic actions of an enity being closer to a &#x27;robot&#x27;, &#x27;botnet&#x27; or &#x27;aimbot-like&#x27; behaviour.<p>&gt; Within the past few years, I have read a lot of comments in social media and forums where people respond with accusations of people being a &quot;Russian bot&quot; or &quot;Chinese bot&quot;.  I can understand what they mean if they use &quot;shill&quot;, but using the word &quot;bot&quot; means to me that the original poster is an autonomous web scraper or automatic program to vigorously defend or attack something.<p>I think shill is a better word here to describe this. If people cannot distinguish between a real user account and a bot account then either this bot account has passed the turing test or Twitter is not doing enough to disclose actual bot accounts. They should do what Keybase did with disclosing bot accounts by signing them up differently and then tying them to the real account holder. Google ReCAPTCHA + phone verification for sign-ups solves the mass automated sign-up issue, distinguishing between real and bot accounts by linking them up with &#x27;owners&#x27; would clear this mystery up.<p>&gt; You can argue that programs like GPT-3 are generating the posts, but I think it&#x27;s obvious by the flow and logic&#x2F;emotional response chain between accusers and accusees that it is between real people because GPT-3 simply cannot handle pulling in knowledge of theory-building in a coherent, substantive way (at least not yet)<p>While it can generate very convincing sentences, it has the limitation of always accepting and responding to nonsensical input, especially in very divisive &#x2F; heated discussions which is likely to be the case. The output will also be limited to data up to 2019 which it was trained on.<p>&gt; My conclusion then is that real people are pushing their viewpoints still, not &quot;bots&quot;, but I may be misunderstanding the way the term is used. Or, has &quot;bot&quot; changed in meaning&#x2F;use? Is it just a word used to effortlessly shut down opposing viewpoints?<p>Exactly. This is almost exactly what this Twitter blogpost outlines about the misunderstanding of the word &quot;bot&quot; [0]. However, My point still stands: If the accuser cannot prove that a particular account has the properties of being a &quot;robot&quot; which issues replies very quickly in an automated fashion [0], then perhaps the fault is on Twitter not being able to find a way to disclose if these accounts are either a &quot;bot or not&quot;. They should overhaul the sign-up process like the way Keybase dealt with bots: Link the bot account with a real account and disclose which real account owns that bot account.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.twitter.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;topics&#x2F;company&#x2F;2020&#x2F;bot-or-not.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.twitter.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;topics&#x2F;company&#x2F;2020&#x2F;bot-or-no...</a>