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George the Next Generation AI?
smileytshirt writes to mention a story on the News.com.au site about George the AI, the latest in a line of chatbots intended to mimic real human behavior. What makes AI George different than, say, ALICE is the recent addition of an avatar: a Flash animated body that reacts mostly in real time to the emotional impact of the conversation. From the article: "One can now have an oral discussion with him over the Internet, 'face to face'. George appears on the website www.jabberwacky.com and takes the form of a thin, bald man with yellow glasses who wears a white turtleneck sweater. He can smile, laugh, sulk and bang his fist on his virtual table. He can turn on the charm and wax romantic. But he can also turn coarse at times. It isn't as if George only learned good manners. "
The Turing test is not a well defined test. Whether a robot passes the Turing test or not, it greatly depends on the intelligence of the human partner. A chatbot may fool a 10-year old, but it may fail with a 20-year old. So in fact, we already have many chatbots that pass the Turing test - it all depends on how you look at the issue.
;)
Hint - most chat bots do not have memory, they do not remember what you talked about 5 minutes ago with them. They just react to the current input, they cannot do more. So, if you ask the chatbot to tell you what you talked about a few minutes ago, it won't be able to do so. That's the dead give away of a chatbot.
Just my 2p, as I live in the UK
I friend of mine, who himself does quite a lot of research in the field of AI, recently told me after attending a conference that most of the researchers in this field approach most problems with the attitude and the naivity of the 1970s. He also told me that the current lack of willingness to approach problems with new tactics and to combine existing AI concepts with other IT topics makes it a lot easier for him to develop kinds of AI systems (he's active in the area of computer linguistics) that haven't been developed before and to produce real innovation.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I think we could develop a "next generation AI" even without answers to difficult philosophical questions. We have barely scratched the surface of what is theoretically possible given the information we have.
We could probably develop an AI that could hold factually and grammatically correct conversations without needing philosophers. That would be a huge improvement considering the current generation of AI is prone to spout gibberish even given a simple question.
Our current best-of-breed AI cannot discern when context is and is not important. If they are programmed to consider context, each answer strings from the last answer/response set, and non-sequitors confuse it. Conversly, if you ask a bot with no sense of context it has difficulty parsing pronouns.
Prestigious ? The Loebner Prize ?
Agreed, this is the only publicized contest of Turing tests, but in the AI community, it is subject to hot debate (and flaming). Rules and scoring systems are known to change from year to year, and its result are really unimpressive. If you take the logs of the contest, you'll see that the winner bots are often those who constantly (and consistently) insult the user, disregarding his questions. They are not mistaken for a human but get a higher grade as they behave "more humanly" (that is at least what happened one year, I hope it changed)
Most contestants (and winners) are remakes of ALICE : it is a database of generic questions and sentence formula to recognize and to react. For instance if you say it "I think X" it will answer you "Why do you think X ?" or, to score more points , "Why should I care, mothaf...r ?!". By pure luck, a coherent thread of conversation can happen, but the bot doesn't try to make sense of the user's sentence in order to react to it, it just tries something that "could probably sound good".
Some chatbots can display interesting behaviors, learning some things in the conversation, but this prize simply doesn't encourage the emergence of these behaviors.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.