Whether it's for restaurants or Trump, bots have gotten pretty good at shilling

For all the huge potential of artificial intelligence, bots still have a long way to go to pass as human. You don't know whether I'm a dog or not, but you can at least be reasonably confident that I'm not a bot. But then I'm writing articles of between 300 and 3,000 words: there's plenty of room to slip up – especially if you've been trained through machine learning, rather than speaking, reading and writing in English for more than 30 years. In the realm of short-form social media and comments sections, where grammar and syntax are both more fluid and less closely scrutinised, it's far easier for bots to blend in, as a study from the University of Chicago found out last week. The bot they'd trained to review restaurants was astroturfing with the best of them. "My family and I are huge fans of this place," the bot gourmet wrote in one sneaky review on Yelp.