Among the Machines: Human-Bot Interaction on Social Q&A Websites

Abstract

With the rise of social media and advancements in AI technology, human-bot interaction will soon be commonplace. In this paper we explore human-bot interaction in STACK OVERFLOW, a question and answer website for developers. For this purpose, we built a bot emulating an ordinary user answering questions concerning the resolution of git error messages. In a first run this bot impersonated a human, while in a second run the same bot revealed its machine identity. Despite being functionally identical, the two bot variants elicited quite different reactions.