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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 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.
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
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.
Indeed, it's easy to show that fooling some people some of the time doesn't require anything even approaching AI. Consider a bot that simply repeats a set of ten sentences in a fixed order: if those sentences were chosen well enough, then some people might easily believe that they were having a real conversation. But I really don't think you'd argue that a bot that simply repeated a set of ten sentences in a fixed order displays any sort of intelligence, no matter how many unsuspecting people happen, by random chance, to feed it lines that cause its responses to look relevant.
What took you so long?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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