a combination of human and automated curators
Curate: select, organize, and present (online content, merchandise, information, etc.), typically using professional or expert knowledge.
"people not only want to connect when using a network but they also enjoy getting credit for sharing or curating information."
You need a kind of AI not even google has for that. Not to mention the kiddiescripters that overpopulate steemit thanks to piston's great functionality.
Call them "voters," if you'd prefer. Then curation is the end result of combining inputs from all the different voters. I certainly don't have professional or expert knowledge about every post that I vote on manually. I doubt if many people do.
A bot is merely an approximation of the operator's own preferences. The closer the approximation, the better the bot. So yes, there is plenty of room for improvement in what we see today, but curation rewards create an incentive for continuous improvement. I'm confident that it will happen.
So far, the only measuring method I've seen from bots is reading the payouts of previous posts to check if the curation reward will be high enough to be worthy of an upvote.
Flipping a coin is not curating.
Following the trends of other bots is not curating.
You are right, it should not be called curation.
PS: "typically using professional or expert knowledge." =! "always". You only need a certain level of interest to curate here, and a bit of criteria; both things totally absent in votebots.
Yes, bots are tools... But, for now people is using screwdrivers to nail boards.
My own bot doesn't even look at payouts. I check its trail regularly, and if I find it voting on something I don't like, I adjust the rules accordingly. Over time, flipping a coin kind-of is curating, because you're doing something like a random walk with error correction to find progressively better approximations for your preferences.
There's no correction in the bots I'm referring to. Just a plain series of IFs, or even worse, a list of "to dos" (like steemvoter.com's).
Your bot, would be the 1st one I see with a small NN that actually works.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it works. Just that I'm always trying to improve it. ; -) I believe that steemvoter plans to introduce premium features that will improve the quality of their clients' voting, too.