Do News Bots Dream of Electric Sheep? - Features - Source: An OpenNews project

Bots have been making the news more and more lately, partly due to the underlying technology becoming more common, and partly due to bots becoming rampaging racists. PCWorld recently suggested that 2016 may be "the year of the bots." But if you read the article, all the examples are of chatbots--bots, to be sure, but only a subset. A bot--to use the broadest sense--is merely "an agent that does an automated process," said Alexis Lloyd, who creates bots and other cutting edge projects at the New York Times Research & Development Lab. But if a "bot" is simply a computer program with an automated function, doesn't that make everything from TweetDeck to your spam filter a bot? "That's where it gets fuzzy," Lloyd said.