benrules2

I have a simple but fairly divisive question for you. Do you think it is ethical for software to interact with humans without the humans being aware it is not a real person?

Looks like he survived folks

I'd like to propose Sanderson's Stormlight Archive as better than Malazan and KKC. It's got worldbuilding, interesting characters, and accessible reading, all while giving us some fresh material. I enjoyed all 3 though.

That's true... KKC is still ongoing too though, and Sanderson's treatment on WoT was great. Mistborn wraps up pretty well too. So I'm optimistic! I'm also a big Sanderson enthusiast if you can't tell.

This flew under my radar for the past few years. I've even written tutorials about writing bots, including using Markov chains on Twitter to imitate real user. One day I noticed suspicious behaviour in some subreddits though and it all clicked for me how easy it would be to astroturf and spread false concensus. So I have been thinking about this a lot more recently.

I completely agree with you as well on the suggestion of marking bots with metadata (or a GUI indicator). Ideally making it easy to know what has been sent through an API.

On this issue my ethical compass comes from "does it benefit the human using the product, or the company (or both)". If it brings value to the user then it is generally ok with me. So when it comes to Reddit/Twitter/Facebook I can't think of anything that benefits the user by keeping it secret.

Personal assistant style AI like that google phone call on the other hand seem to work toward enhancing natural human computer interactions, which I am also in favour of. It really comes down to how people feel after they find out it was a bot, and I honestly don't know how people react in these cases.

Hypothetically it should not be a problem if the programmers are competent and well intentioned.

The real ethics pertaining to the end user does come from how it is used. I think building tools that can't be easily be used maliciously is also the responsibility of a good software architect though.

Thank you for your response and the discussion! Id be interested to hear some customer anecdotes too if you've got any relating to this subject.