Spot the bot, stop the rot

The very traits that make bots helpful—speed, scale, and tireless repetition—are the same traits that get repurposed for abuse

- SANDEEP KURIAKOSE R CHANDRA MOULI

IN A SCENE from The Wizard of Oz, Glinda asks Dorothy: “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” Swap “witch” for “bot” and the question writes itself. Or let’s take a Kollywood example: In the film Nayakan, a child asks Kamal Hassan playing the title role of don Velu Nayakkar: “Are you a good person or a bad person?”

Likewise, the question we need to ask in the digital world: Is it a good bot or a bad bot? Strange but true, just as in humans the complexities of good and evil are embedded in every bot, which by design mimic humans.

Bot, short for robot, emerged with the development of software programmes designed to perform automated, repetitive tasks. The first chatbot, ELIZA, was developed in 1966 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, to imitate human conversation. In the present day, we are familiar with advanced conversational bots such as ChatGPT. We also have chatbots integrated into websites, messaging apps, social media platforms, and voice assistants (example Alexa).

Bots are as interactive as humans, and therefore an asset to voice-led services such as call centres. For example, customers could converse with a chatbot to change passwords, request a balance on an account, or schedule an appointment—scenarios relegated to science fiction a few years earlier and dependent on human interface until recently.

The very traits that make bots helpful—speed, scale, and tireless repetition—are the same traits that get repurposed for abuse.