Far from just being an internet diversion, the Mozilla-funded project makes users question whether bots can distort truth, erode privacy, and deceive the public.
Bot or Not, winner of a Mozilla Creative Media Award, is inviting everyone on the internet to give it a playthrough to see if they can distinguish between a bot and another human being.
The Bot or Not web app is simple, has a minimal interface, and presents its users with a simple premise: Chat with someone for three minutes and try to determine if they’re a bot or another human using the app.
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A single game of Bot or Not is divided into several rounds: A free chat where you can talk about anything you want, and some alternating question and answer in which one user asks a truth-or-dare-style question to the other to see what they say. At the end of four rounds, users are prompted to decide whether the person they were chatting with is real or not—and both parties are making a call.
Bot or Not was created as part of the Mozilla Creative Media Awards, which funded eight different projects in 2019 for release in May 2020. The theme of the awards reveals that the purpose of the project is greater than just a few minutes of interrogating strangers or robots on the internet: It raises questions of, “how (artificial intelligence) AI-like machine learning impacts our understanding of the truth.”
Gary Zhexi Zhang of Foreign Objects, the organization behind Bot or Not, said the app should make people look at bots with a critical eye: “Bot or Not seeks to give people a critical perspective over these non-human conversational agents, both in terms of how they work and how the proliferation of increasingly advanced human-like bots are likely to complicate how we navigate our highly-mediated society.”
Once users finish playing a round of Bot or Not they’re directed to learn more about the project through Bot or Not’s Guide for the Bot Curious, where its authors make arguments that public-facing bots, at least in their current form, come with some problems.
The problem with human-like bots
Foreign Objects’ co-director Agnes Cameron said that the proliferation of bots (in 2016, Gartner predicted that the average American would have more interactions online with bots than with their spouses by 2020) spells trouble for personal privacy, both online and off.
“The increasing presence of bots in both the domestic sphere and in the workplace presents a huge risk to privacy, so long as personal data remains the primary business model for most major tech platforms,” Cameron said.
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Along with the risk to privacy posed by bots like digital assistants that constantly listen, or customer service bots that record their interactions, Bot or Not’s authors make the argument that bots have deception baked into their very design.
“Even with legal disclosure, human-like bots are built by corporations to elicit users’ emotional responses in order to make sales and gather data,” Foreign Objects said in its Bot Curious post. It gives credence to the argument o