Table of Contents
1 Cover
7 1 What is a Bot? Where Does the Word ‘‘Bot’’ Come From? History of the Bot Early bots – Daemons and ELIZA Bots and the early internet: Infrastructural roles on Usenet Bots proliferate on internet relay chat Bots and online gaming on MUD environments Bots and the World Wide Web Crawlers, web-indexing bots Spambots and the development of the Robot Exclusion Standard Social media and the dawn of social bots Different Types of Bots APIs – How bots connect to websites and social media Social bots Chatbots Service bots and bureaucrat bots Crawlers/spiders Spambots Cyborgs Zombies, or compromised-device bots Lots of bots – botnets Misnomers and Misuse Important bot characteristics Conclusion Notes
8 2 Bots and Social Life Bots and Global Society Social Bots, Social Media Bots, Journalism, and the News Bots, Dating, Videogames, and More Conclusion Notes
9 3 Bots and Political Life Astroturfing, Inauthenticity, and Manual Messaging Identifying Bots: Actors, Behavior, Content The Tactics Used by Political Bots Dampening Hashtag poisoning DDoS attacks Amplification Harassment Political Bots and Their Uses Influencing voter turnout Surveillance Passive surveillance – information gathering and analytics Active surveillance – transparency Social activism – The dawn of the bots populi The Bot Arms Race Conclusion Notes
10 4 Bots and Commerce What Is a Business Bot? Business Chatbots and Customer Service Transactional Bots and Finance Conclusion Notes
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5 Bots and Artificial Intelligence
What Is AI?
History of AI and Bots
What Limits the Progress of AI?
Agent-Based AI, the Semantic Web and Machine Learning
How Bots Use AI
Bot detection
Chatbots and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Non-AI chatbots
Corpus-based chatbots and fuzzy logic
AI-based chatbots
Conversational