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Comment by duiker101 | Hacker News Reader

That was so weird to read. If they are really free to say whatever they want can they talk trash about amazon and keep the ambassador job?

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They're not real, they're Twitter chat bots. That Amazon thinks this was a good PR move is truly astonishing.

It’s astonishing people are so confident these are bots.

No real evidence of that and it’s more likely they’re real. Occam’s razor.

The evidence came a bit further down with one commenter posting a picture of one being male in one post and female in another.

That's just evidence that multiple humans share the same account for whatever reason.

My guess on how it's happening is that Amazon Turk workers are presented with tweets and then they select from a list of machine-generated responses. I'd still call those bots.

I think it's more likely they all use shared computers and one person didn't log out of their account. The same way Ted Cruz's account liked a porn tweet about some incest porn, media guy (because as much as I love the idea of Ted f*ing Cruz trolling twitter for some porn I doubt the man runs his own twitter) forgot to log out of the account he was managing, is probably how we got this multi-aged meta human.

What about the initial guy that says he has a grandchild when he's like a young guy from the phillipines?

There does not exist a 1:1 correspondence between Twitter accounts and individual humans.

Bots or not, it's not very authentic or honest, and certainly not good PR.

They're people (one person?) following a corporate script, but they're clearly not literally chatbots. Chatbots aren't even this coherent.

Maybe not the ones you're used to but Amazon is a tech company at heart. They have the resources to improve on the algorithms. I'd love to meet the engineer responsible for this.

It's not astonishing enough to make you doubt your analysis.

defo a bot, the fact they are using different account's to reply. super weird.

It seems like they’re using an enterprise account that has a bunch of sub accounts attached to it. It probably brings all replies and subtweets into a single feed that any of the “ambassadors” can have added to their queue to reply to.

Text-banking systems for political campaigns work like this, but those interactions are purely informational and aren’t intended to put a human face on anything. Applying it this way is. . . Very bizarre.

ahh, that makes more sense!

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