Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing methods only leverage texts or networks alone, and while few works explored the shallow combination of the two modalities, we hypothesize that the interaction and information exchange between texts and graphs could be crucial for holistically evaluating bot activities on social media. In addition, according to a recent survey (Cresci, 2020), Twitter bots are constantly evolving while advanced bots steal genuine users' tweets and dilute their malicious content to evade detection. This results in greater inconsistency across the timeline of novel Twitter bots, which warrants more attention. In light of these challenges, we propose BIC, a Twitter Bot detection framework with text-graph Interaction and semantic Consistency. Specifically, in addition to separately modeling the two modalities on social media, BIC employs a text-graph interaction module to enable information exchange across modalities in the learning process. In addition, given the stealing behavior of novel Twitter bots, BIC proposes to model semantic consistency in tweets based on attention weights while using it to augment the decision process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BIC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on two widely adopted datasets. Further analyses reveal that text-graph interactions and modeling semantic consistency are essential improvements and help combat bot evolution.

Programming a computer is, if you squint, a bit like magic. You have to learn the words to the spell to convince a carefully crafted lump of sand to do what you want. If you understand the rules deeply enough, you can chain together the spells to force the sand to do ever more complicated tasks. If your spell is long and well-crafted enough, you can even give the sand the illusion of sentience. That illusion of sentience is nowhere more strong than in the world of machine learning, where text generation engines like GPT-3 and LaMDA are able to hold convincing conversations, answer detailed questions, and perform moderately complex tasks based on just a written request.

The last three chapters (chapter 1, chapter 2 and chapter 3) were dedicated to the theoretical aspect and the underlying structure of various Text Summarization methods. This chapter shows a concrete…

Running AI these days is increasingly simple due to the hard work of open source contributors producing top-notch libraries out there, and research groups opening up their work so others can build on it. One key library doing that is HuggingFace's Transformers library. HuggingFace are a startup building, amongst other NLP-related products, a library and model ecosystem that allows almost anyone to quickly and easily set up AI-powered chat bots that can consume or produce natural language. In this post, I'll demonstrate how I used this library to produce a Twitter bot that is only tweeting made-up (and slightly quirky) good news This blog post isn't meant to explain any theory, but for those who aren't familiar, the easiest way to explain this kind of AI, is they're sophisticated pattern recognition systems. If you feed it enough data, it can build up an ability to recognize the patterns in the english language, to the extent that if you ask it to repeat the pattern, not only will it generate mostly correct English grammar, it might also from time to time generate a coherent sentence!

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is changing how companies find, hire and manage talent.

I am a poet and artist, and I make Twitter bots. The term "bot" encompasses many different kinds of software agents, from conversation simulators like Eliza, to programs that write stories about sports events without human intervention, to automatically created social media accounts that spam hashtags. The bots I make have an artistic and literary bent: for example, I made @everyword -- which tweeted every word in the English language in alphabetical order over the course of seven years -- and more recently @the_ephemerides, which tweets computer-generated poetry juxtaposed with NASA imagery. I'm part of a community of bot-making artists (loosely known as #botALLY) who are taking the canvas of social media and covering it with computer-generated writing and other kinds of generative art. As part of Sam Woolley's provocateur-in-residence workshop at Data & Society, I was asked to write a provocation regarding automated agents and bots from my perspective as a poet and artist.

A new Twitter bot shows that not all them are bigots -some just want to make you smile. '@smilevector' was recently unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting predecessor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by turning their frown upside down. Using neural networks, this algorithm can plant unsettling smiles on celebrities with what seems to be impressive accuracy. '@smilevector was unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting processor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by making them smile. Created by Tom White, a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in Wellington, New Zealand, this algorithm uses a generative neural net to manipulate faces.

Donald Trump has mastered the art of the one-liner. The US presidential candidate now has a Twitter bot twin that tries to mimic his signature soundbites. The bot tweets Trump-like statements using an artificial intelligence algorithm based on hours of the candidate's debate speech transcripts. "Trump's language tends to be more simplistic, so I figured that, as a modeling problem, he would be the most manageable candidate to study," says Bradley Hayes, the bot's creator and a researcher at MIT's Computer Science and and Artificial Intelligence Lab, in a statement. Hayes calls the bot DeepDrumpf, which refers to John Oliver's recent segment about Trump's ancestral name. Take a look at a few of DeepTrumpf's hilarious, bizarre, and oddly poetic tweets.

Today begins with the proliferation of political Twitter bots, testing Sony's pricey full-frame camera, tens of thousands of recipes from your Amazon Echo and LG's new phone for audiophiles. For a second, we forgot all about mirrorless shooters.24 Sony's A99 II is set to arrive later this month priced at $3,200, body-only. Edgar Alvarez says high-end lenses help make the most of the camera, but it's the autofocusing skills that are particularly impressive. Don't let its dull looks fool you, Senior Editor Chris Velazco says that beyond the V20's flagship-level power and slightly tweaked version of Android Nougat is a device tailor-made for creatives.

During my commute the other day, I ended up on a dark subway car. The train still had power--the air conditioning was on, the announcements were coming through--but all the lights were dead. I live near an above-ground stop, so at first there was morning sunshine coming in through the windows. But when the train went underground, we were plunged into complete darkness. I found myself suddenly in a sea of floating, ghostly faces, illuminated by the glow of smartphones.