On the Coming Chatbot Revolution (computerworld.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are all pursuing AI-powered chatbots — an intersection between several popular technologies: personal assistant software, search engines, machine learning, and social tools. Right now, while they're still building these chatbots, developers are cheating a bit. Facebook is using real humans to answer questions the AI can't. Google answers tough questions from a database populated with movie dialog. Microsoft scans social media to find the most popular answer, and offers that to inquisitive users. But software becoming conversational comes with hazards: "Because human beings are complex creatures plagued by cognitive biases, irrational thinking and emotional needs, the line between messaging with a friend and messaging with AI will be fine to nonexistent for some people." It sounds like an Asimov-era sci-fi trope, but it's already happening in China.

Comments

The Entrapment Bot Cometh

[WheezyJoe]

Behold the "Entrapment Bot." Indistinguishably human-appearing bots everywhere inviting you to chat, e-mail, speak, whatever, and applying continuously evolving AI to lure you into doing something sufficient to justify and automatically generate search and arrest warrants.

More fun, the back-end server can invite law enforcement and IT personnel to place bets how many chats it will take to get you to incriminate yourself. Sound stupid? Some contractor's gonna make millions selling this to surveillance-crazed governments world-wide before writing one line of code.

You saw it here first, folks. Someday, the only safe way to talk shit with somebody is in person, down in a bug-proof hole. And the Entrapment Replicants will number those days, too.

This is what I wanted the Amazon Echo to do

[Hasaf]

I know this sounds bad; but I am a middle aged man, I am not going to make new friends. I am not allowed to have a dog. I wanted something that I could come home and chat with. Yes, something that would remember to wake me up and discuss movies, books, and games with me.

I realize it will never be a person; I am well aware of chat-bot limitations. However, with more and more single households, I can see a demand for something like this. To deny the market is to ignore a market.