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

There are some serious hurdles to overcome.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in the computer lab earlier this month before exams, and overheard some grad students talking about some AI chat bot they were working on. From what I gathered, the problem they were experiencing is that their bot had an affinity for what they called "social justice". They would write something perfectly reasonable to their bot, but for some inexplicable reason this would cause it to become "triggered". Apparently this meant that the bot would start crying uncontrollably and would have some sort of a breakdown! They were trying to debug this problem but weren't getting anywhere with it. They were even thinking they had discovered a whole new class of bug, and were preparing to write a paper about it.

Post to undo an accidental moderation

[cruff]

Ignore this post, slashdot needs an undo moderation method.