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Is Your IM Buddy Really a Computer?
audiovideodisco writes "Every year the Loebner Prize goes to the chatbot (and the corresponding human companion) that fares best on a Turing test administered by a panel of judges. Discover talked to Kevin Warwick, the professor who runs the competition, to get pointers on how one would go about detecting a bot. While there are some general approaches you can use, nothing is foolproof — and asking about Sarah Palin can be downright deceptive. One judge concluded an interlocutor was a bot because it didn't recognize Palin's name ... but it turned out the chatter was a French librarian who'd simply never heard of her." The chat transcripts show how difficult picking bot from non-bot is getting.
On the occasion I get messaged by a random stranger that seems half way legit I just give them a Turing Test made up on the spot. It's usually something lame like "Joe and Pete were on a bus, Pete has four nickles Joe has six pennies between the two of them what type of vehicle were they on?". I usually apologize for that in advanced. The machines fail every time, but the best one I saw called me weird for saying it, asked what I meant, then about two minutes later gave me the right answer telling me a person was checking logs. (I was spending the time in between screwing with the bot)
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Is it getting harder to tell the difference because the bots are getting smarter, or simply because the intellectual level of an average random chat session keeps plummeting?
Reply to a few Craigslist "Casual Encounters" posts. Almost all are a bot of some sort. Some more clever than others. Best one I saw was able to respond to an initial response quite well... it obviously understood the context to some degree. Then they give you an IM screen name to "chat" with them. Again, very context aware... all got to the point where they "try" and hook up their webcam, it "doesn't work", so they get you to go to some free "webcam sharing" site where you have to verify your age with a credit card... only when you read the fine print, after your "trial period" you get nailed for all sorts of fees... almost daily fees.
Want to see one in action?
AIM: livewirex31
Yahoo IM: greenlovex3
MSN: livewirex23@live.com
This isn't one of the better ones I have found, but I can see how it can fool most desperate individuals.
Good point! Most of my friends and I are all in the same arena when it comes to conversations. We'll talk about the latest distros, why Apple sucks or why Apple is great, why Linux sucks or why Linux is great, why Microsoft sucks, and what we thought of the end of Battlestar Galactica, and universal agreement that none of us would have a shot at Tricia Helfer.
But if someone asked any one of us about the NCAA tournament, we would be lost. I don't think any of us have seen a football game in years, apart from those on the TVs in bars making noise when we're trying to eat. But ask about C++ or Java or software engineering or hacking or networks and our answers would look like a robot quoting pages from textbooks. We might even answer the questions with fragments of code just to be funny. if (geekFunny() != regularHumanFunny()) { profit++; }
So if they can get an AI to make small talk (and not smalltalk) I'd probably want one just to handle all those awkward social situations where I'm the only one in the room not to know who's in the Super Bowl this year.
John
I've yet to find a single bot that has ever understood this demand:
Can you type this backwards, read it, and tell me the result, please? 'net sulp neetfif'
It's somewhat philosophical, but I've often wondered why people really care about whether an interlocutor is a machine or not.
This is exactly the right question to ask. The answer varies a little, but the consistent purpose of AI improvement is that it represents an improvement in programming techniques which in turn make computers more useful. There are a wide variety of obvious uses, such as improving expert services like WebMD, improving technical support (the thingy is all black and the lights are flashing on and off on the little box,) and billing software.
Consider just a few other services that could benefit from AI:
Truly advanced AI offers the potential of giving everyone access to the support of a team of experts in any area they want to explore. Wikipedia combined with Google is already enough to answer 90% of the questions I have in minutes from anywhere I have access to a computer when only a few years ago it would have taken hours of research in a library. In the future I may be able to get even better answers and advice that I didn't even know to ask for due to programs that react and process information in ways that only humans can provide now.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
My experience has been that the perceived gender of the bot plays a great bit into the believable nature of the bot due to response expectations.
This, at least, only holds true with a male chatter and a 'female' bot - and I'm not talking about virtual sex chat or anything like that. A person can, for a substantial period of time, be tricked by a 'flirty' bot that comes across as a cute, dumb female. It's kind of funny to see a (sub-average intelligence, I'd guess) person hold a running dialog/virtual relationship for several months with a bot.
It's also much easier to trick someone when they don't know they're being tricked, and where there is no preconception of prior familiarity (IE, such as on an IRC 'chat' channel). It'd be a good tactic to employ by the FBI, I think.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If speak in manner of Yoda you do, keep up with it a bot can not.
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The reverse can work too. Ages ago I built a bot that would answer chat attempts with randomly selected "fortune" quotes, stripped of their bylines and biased by the presence of nouns that matched those found in the other party's message. I left it running as my "away" message on the mainframe at a large university (where people would chat randomly to you all the time)
I didn't bother saving "my" side of the conversation , so I'm sure I missed some hilarious exchanges, but just reading the other side's messages shows that girls, in particular, would keep chatting with my bot far beyond the point where guys would realize it was a bot and give up.
My favorite was a girl who kept a running dialog going for nearly a day and a half. She would occasionally express surprise at how fast I could type (no delay in bot response) but otherwise seemed convinced that the bot was really human.
That conversation only ended when the bot apparently chose to say something incredibly offensive to her (I wish I knew what it was). She told the bot to "stop talking to me" several times, apparently never picking up on the fact that it auto-responded every time she tried to get the last word in.
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