Laziness in humans could be used to tell us apart from bots

Humans' unique laziness when it comes to interacting on social media could be the key to telling us apart from artificially intelligent'bots', a new study shows. US researchers have identified behavioural trends of humans on Twitter that are absent in social media bots – namely a decrease in tweet length over time. The team studied how the behaviour of humans and bots changed over the course of a session on Twitter relating to political events. While humans get lazier as sessions progress and can't be bothered typing out long tweets, bots maintain consistent levels of engagement over time. Such a behavioural difference could inform new machine learning algorithms for bot detection software.