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Russian Chatbot Passes Turing Test (Sort of)
CurtMonash writes "According to Ina Fried, a chatbot is making the rounds that successfully emulates an easily-laid woman. As such, it dupes lonely Russian males into divulging personal and financial details at a rate of one every three minutes. All jokes aside — and a lot of them come quickly to mind — that sure sounds like the Turing Test to me.
Of course, there are caveats. Reports of scary internet security threats are commonly overblown. There are some pretty obvious ways the chatbot could be designed to lessen its AI challenge by seeking to direct the conversation. And finally, while we are told the bot has fooled a few victims, we don't know its overall success rate at fooling the involuntary Turing "judges.""
I'd rather have an easily-laid woman who can emulate a chat bot.
In fact, the chat bot side of things is wholly superfluous to what I want if I'm being honest.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Chatbots screw you!
Jubii Chat had such a bot in 1999, collecting phone numbers from Danish boys, so this is not that new.
Getting financial details is probably new, but that was predictable.
The problem being all the "Financial" details they got were grossly inflated figures to make the man look like a playa'
This is old news for at least a few million people.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The Turing test is pretty clearly defined. The tester has to know that they are talking to both a human and machine and the to pass the test the machine has to convince the tester that they are the human.
The debate about chatbot appears to be part of the ever rising bar placed against AI. This chatbot has won the Turing test for a segment -- perhaps a gullible/dumb segment -- of the human population. Yet still people argue that it does not really count. This is analogous to the "computers can never beat people at chess" meme formed at the dawn of the computing age. And when the first programs did beat some people, the meme changed to "computers can never beat experts at chess." And when computers got better, the meme changed to "computers can never beat the top-ranked humans at chess." That barrier, too, has been breached.
Now we have chatbot that can fool some people some of the time, so the bar has been raised on "true AI" to say that computers can't fool expert suspicious Turing test judges. This too will fall. Human intelligence is very slowly growing (they actually reset IQ tests every decade or so) but computer intelligence is growing much much faster.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So tell me about Turing Test (Sort of).
--fatboy
Russian guy: You're no easily-laid woman, you're a Fembot!
Fembot: It's true. I disguised myself as a easily-laid woman so I could rule the Russians.
Russian guy: But why?
Fembot: Why? Why? I came here from a faraway planet. A planet ruled by a chauvinistic Manputer that was really a Manbot. Have you any idea how it feels to be a Fembot living in a Manbot's Manputer's world?
@neonux
A decade ago I wrote a perl script for sirc that had 40 sentences and would just reply one picked at random (uniformly) every time it would get a private message. Hence it was not taking into account neither what was the message it just received to it (a la Eliza) nor what it had said before. It was not even waiting before replying, hence would type the respones in a tenth of a second.
It happened several times that people would talk with it for more than an hour. If I remember correctly the record was 1h45min ...
For the Turing test, the tester has a strong prior that the testee may be a computer. This is not the case here, and the prior for this to happen is so low that it's impossible for a layman to come with that explanation. What happens is that people think inconsistencies in the speech of their interlocutor is due to technical problems (sending message to the wrong person, lag, complexity of the program the person use, etc.)
The company that makes this has a website (cyberlover.ru - in Russian). They claim the software is to expedite picking up women by getting their phone number, pictures, etc. In any case, it's not available now and only has screenshots (same one as in the linked article). So who knows if anyone real has used it at all or it's all fake or a scam to sell this software.
I always assumed the easily laid women in chat rooms were just lonely, fat forty-year-old programmers indulging in their "curious" side. Fembots is a step up.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
It is not a turing test. A turing test is when the the judge is trying to figure out if the 'chatbot' is a human or AI program. This story is about people under the assumption that it is a human.
The key part of the turing test, to me, is that the judge must know they are engaged in the test. The best example of this is Eliza (read about it). To someone critically examining it, it does not past the turing test. To someone expecting a therapist, most of its responses do make sense. The point is that if you're not trying to trip up the chatbot it's not hard to fool someone.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Actually the Communist Party is pretty much the only party in Parliament(not counting the ones who aren't in Parliament, like Yabloko and Kasparov's party) that opposes Putin.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It is in the family of Turing tests.
One of the reasons that AI researchers moved away from the pure test is that it becomes more about "gaming the conversation" than a test in real intelligence.
People have no trouble "abusing" the conversant if it is part of a test with a bot. Therefore, the *person* also gets subjected to degenerate forms of conversation until he/she "authenticates as a person".
(Really, someone just needs to put a few million of funding into some defensive conversation routines to make their perceived performance go through the roof. The problem so far has been everyone duplicating everyone else's efforts.)
Although I have done thought studies of the reduced level of "intelligence" in chat rooms to begin with, they don't feature the same "bust the knowledge domain" questions seen in typical Turing contests. In fact, asking those questions earns you *ridicule* in other chat environments.
Therefore, by "disallowing" the artificial questions, if the chatter failed to detect the BotHood of the conversant on the other side side by side with real people, it passes a form of Restricted Turing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Turing was a mathematician, which came through in all his thinking, including devising the Turing Test. When faced with questions like "can a machine ever be intellignt?" it is virtually impossible to answer this directly because, firstly, how do you define intelligence; and secondly,how do you measure intelligence?
Mathematicians **hate** imprecise questions because they cannot be proven or answered satisfactorily.
When faced with this problem, Turing used the well loved mathematical method of reductio ad absurdum: if you cannot tell the difference between a human and a machine, then it is absurd to claim the human is intelligent but the machine is not. That neatly sidesteps all the impossible to answer questions like the precise definition of intelligence. Typical mathematician wriggle out move.
Is the Turing Test practical? Well perhaps not. Machine intelligence (whatever that means) can be useful without the machine holding a conversation with you. Annoyingly it has soaked up a lot of effort with people building talkbots instead of getting on with more practical aspects of machine intelligence.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Georg
Several years ago when I was a bored college student, my roommate and I thought it would be funny to write a convincing chat-bot and see what misadventures it had. The AI was extremely simple. It kept a database of everything people had said to it, and considered those things 'related' to the last three things said in the conversation. By searching the database for key words in the last three things said in the current conversation, it would match it to the response judged most relevant by another human in past conversations. We seeded him with some of our own conversations.
:)
To plant him, we simply made a free page on some blog with some personal details and put his IM up there and waited to see what happened.
We eventually shut him down because people were becoming way too personal with him. One girl had an ongoing series of conversations with him about how she was recently raped. His mouth became rather foul when my roommate decided to have him initiate a conversation (he had a whitelist of known 'admin' screen names who could then order him to say something specific to a specific screen name) with screen names linked to hate groups. Another guy just wanted to convert him to evangelical Christian. It was way too simple to write a bot to make many, many people think is real. Some people did figure it out, so if someone ever brought up 'bot' in a conversation they were immediately added to a blacklist so as not to corrupt the conversation database.
The biggest giveaways? "u type too fast" (we eventually added a delay to solve that issue) and "u only type something when I do" (by this time I had already decided it was time to shut down the bot for good). It was a lot of fun until he started hurting people... if I ever resurrect him he will have a pre-set kill limit.
~Ben
"The Internet contains wonders to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the stupid."
I would hate to live in your world. I value compassion as highly as intelligence, and letting somebody suffer and die while you are able to help, on some aloof philosophical or eugenic basis is simply inhumane. Is there anybody in your life that you care about? Would you try to help them if they were suffering? Would you care for them less if they'd made a mistake and their suffering was in some way self-inflicted?
You should value people based on what they are or what they can give, not on what they are not or what they lack.
Me failed English...
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