How to Tell that Your New Friend is a Bot

Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash

So, when your new friend in the Medium Comments asks for your email address so she can communicate with you directly — and you point out that your address is clearly shown on your Profile, but she asks you to type it out for her here, anyway — that’s a giveaway that you are talking to a bot.

And when, in the ensuing email, she asks which subjects you like most to talk about on Medium — even though she already knows the answer, being a loyal subscriber to your stories — that is another giveaway that you are talking to a bot.

And when you answer her research question about the most important factors that made your life successful, by crediting your wife’s support (and mentioning her full name) — and your new friend repeats your wife’s full name when she acknowledges your answer — that, too, is a giveaway that you are not actually exchanging correspondence with a real person.

And when you tell her that you are not in the market for a writing course or publishing advice (even though she never made any reference to any such things) and her response is that you needn’t worry about that yet — Guess what? You sussed it out.

This level of AI can get pretty sophisticated. But it still contains these uncomfortable machine errors that would not come from a real person.

Lesson learned: Next time I am asked to type out my email address even though it already appears in my Profile, I am going to decline.