New Study Shows Bots Can Increase Online Engagement but This Can Decrease Human-to-Human Interaction

In the mid of 2024, Meta announced AI Studio to let users create their own chatbot using AI which can be used for specific tasks like creating social media captions or making them use an avatar. Meta’s VC said that they are also trying to make these AI chatbots exist on the platforms with a proper account having a bio and profile picture. If AI chatbots start to have separate accounts, they can spread false information on social feeds with their automatically generated content. This is spreading concerns about the role of bots on social media platforms and even though Meta has removed some of its AI bots from its platforms, there are still user-generated AI bots there. Firms are also looking for ways to make users interact with AI technologies more because of their heavy investments so they are using AI bots for that. Reddit and X also have many pre-programmed bots that moderate content and interact with users but they are not the AI ones.

According to a new research published in MIS Quarterly, bots are helpful in increasing user engagement but they are also impacting human-to-human interactions on different platforms. There are different types of bots, from simple to advanced, and they perform tasks according to the guidelines given to them. WikiTextBot is a bot on Reddit that replies Wikipedia summaries to posts containing Wikipedia links. These types of bots are known as “reflexive bots” which work because of the application programming interface (API) which allows them to see every post that comes under their area of expertise. There are also some “supervisory bots” on Reddit which moderate posts and delete the ones which are against the community guidelines.

These bots are rigid and only perform tasks according to the guidelines given to them but they can become more advanced if AI technologies get incorporated into them. It is also important to know how these bots can impact human-to-human interaction in online communities. Researchers analyzed some Reddit posts between 2005 and 2019 to know what was the structure of human-to-human interaction in the posts as the bot activity increased on the platform. It was found that increase in reflexive bots that generate and share content also increased human-to-human interaction, but it was also observed that this resulted in fewer human posts and back and forth interaction between humans. Supervisory bots decreased human interactions as well because there were less human moderators who could enforce community laws. Key members used to interact with each other to create and implement community norms and guidelines but this has decreased now because of supervisory bots. AI bots can create new accounts and interact with users, which will result in higher engagement on their platforms but this will come with the cost of human-to-human interaction.