Toast is Yummy28: Hey Clive, Ireally dig your site…

pomeranian99: Cool!

Artificial-intelligence experts tend to pooh-pooh chatbots, because they argue that they’re not “real” intelligence. Because chatbots can only use preprogrammed responses to coverse, scientists think they’re fundamentally un-human-like. Chatbots tend to be incredibly dull, unable to follow a logical conversational thread, and prone to repeating the same thing over and over again.

At which point one might well ask … what precisely is so un-human-like about that? Hell, that describes about half the conversations I overhear on the subway, and easily 95% of all online chat. As I’ve argued many times in the past, artificial intelligence succeeds most when it aims low rather than high, since human intelligence is itself most often parked in neutral. I’ve sure you been at a party, got trapped in a dull conversation, and found yourself totally tuning out, chiming in with the occasional bot-like response — “oh?”; “cool”; “yeah?” — merely to keep up the appearance that you’re paying attention. The thing is, that’s all you need to do to hold up one end of a dialogue, since many people engage in conversation not to actually exchange ideas but to merely listen to the sound of their own voices; either that, or they’re simply pinging their friends to remind them of their existence.

Anyway. The point is, I’ve argued this for years, and anti-chatbot scientists have had one simple response: “You’re wrong, because you yourself would never be fooled by a chatbot if you were talking with one.” I disagreed, arguing that were a chatbot to engage me in conversation without my knowing it wasn’t real, I would probably never guess.

And ya know what? I was right. Because yesterday, someone sicced a chatbot on me. They went to a new site called “Chatting AIM Bot”, where you can send a chatbot to initiate a conversation with an unsuspecting friend — and then watch to see if they get fooled. And, as you can see by the chat log below, I did indeed get fooled.

WARNING: You’ll notice I didn’t link to the “Chatting AIM Bot” site, and that’s for a reason. When I visited it, I discovered the site is crammed full of drive-by spyware and adware that automatically instals itself on your machine. So, enjoy the trick below, but don’t visit the site; they’re pretty sleazy.

Forthwith:

Toast is Yummy28: Hey Clive, Ireally dig your site…

pomeranian99: Cool!

pomeranian99: glad you like it

Toast is Yummy28: cool as ice!

(Click on “more” below to see the rest of it!)