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

Ashley led the way

[clockley(571021718)]

http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madi...

Re:Ashley led the way

[gweihir]

More like most human beings are not as smart as they think they are and are generally easy to fool. Just look at religion, advertising, politics, etc. Even fraud working on a fixed script (such as many religions use) can fool many people successfully.

Chatbot therapist...

[fahrbot-bot]

"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."

And how does that make you feel to be because human beings are complex creatures plagued by cognitive biases, irrational thinking and emotional needs?

Re:Post to undo an accidental moderation

[vanDrunen]

Slashdot needs several things...

Unicode support being not the least of them.

maybe you should check out Beta... I heard a lot of good things about it :)

Can you elaborate on how chatbots make you feel?

[smoothnorman]

And what makes you believe that the coming chatbot revolution is a source of concern?

Can you explain what makes you say that?

Perhaps we can start again, why is it that you think that concern is something that you feel about chatbots?

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.

Re:Eliza

[jtara]

For the n00bs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Hails originally from 1964-1966.

It was fun for a moment for me when in college in 1972 to re-code it in Snobol...

Reasonably convincing. No AI. Just some clever, crude parsing and a small bit of contextual memory.

The conversations from this advanced 50-years-later technology looks about the same...

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.

Re: This is what I wanted the Amazon Echo to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeezus. Thats the most depressing thing I've ever read.

Re:This is what I wanted the Amazon Echo to do

[PopeRatzo]

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.

As long as it has a working class Scottish accent and curses a lot, I'll interact with a chatbot all day long.

"How are you today, AngusBot?"

"ALL TURN YER FOOKIN BOABY INSIDE OOT YA MANKY COONT"

Re:This is what I wanted the Amazon Echo to do

[AthanasiusKircher]

Do you really think, you will feel good knowing it's a bot that you are talking to? If you are a kid or someone who's never been told that the other end is not a human, might enjoy the talks; but knowing very well that the other end is just arranging the words using some algorithm, what joy you think it will give you? I understand each one is different but it kind of puzzles me.

It puzzles me personally, too. But it's a well-known phenomenon, going back to the days of ELIZA decades ago. Even when told that there's no "person" on the other side of an electronic chat, people still often engage emotionally.

If someone is reaching out to the bot to handle loneliness; how will this eliminate it? Most us humans interact not really because of the content of the words -- it's because there is something common we share -- a shared destiny [the reason we are here..a journey.. call it soul/higher power/purpose etc].

People "talk" to deities too -- they rarely even "talk back" to most people, but people often find solace in doing so. Early ELIZA users often reported "sensing an intelligence" even after explicitly being told that there was none.

People project all sorts of things onto emotional interactions. If they need to vent or have some sort of interaction, what they say when they vent is often more important emotionally than what the response is. Hence therapy sessions (which can frequently happen) where a patient just goes in and rants for an hour, then pays a couple hundred dollars for the therapist to say, "Okay, time's up, see you next week."

Some people need to FEEL like someone is listening and caring, even if no one is. God, psychiatrists, etc. can fill that role. Why not chatbots?

BTW there are too many negatives in your statement; I don't know how you can be so sure of your future.. no one knows what's around the corner.. life changes in an instant..that's the mystery of Life

That I'll agree with. GP is way too negative. Thinking negative is more likely to produce negative results. I don't know the future either, but having a view like "I'm never gonna make friends and I'm never gonna have a meaningful emotional relationship again" is rarely helpful in making friends and having meaningful relationships.

Obligatory xkcd

[burtosis]

xkcd suspicion

Re:Eliza

[angel'o'sphere]

I once put an Eliza into an IRC channel. As soon as one mentioned its name, the bit was called Pirx, he drew that person into a talk. Obviously he created an "Eliza Instance" for every conversation. So he could answer to all partners individually.

Once we had like 20 people in the chat and half of them where talking to Pirx and commenting to each other about his answers. After a few minutes they accused me I would be typing for him ... was quite funny.

It was just a simple Eliza, no real "enhancements".

Re:Post to undo an accidental moderation

[KGIII]

Does that one case involve a president and someone making threats toward said president? If that's the case, I recall that one. I can't think of any others. I've seen lots of people *claim* they were censored and even found a glitch or two but I don't know of any other instances where a post has been deleted. I do know that they won't let you say certain things in certain ways. I guess we could call those censorship.

Sometimes, a reply will not show up in threads that exceed a certain size. I don't know what happens but you can actually see the reply by clicking on the parent comment and viewing it as a single thread. You can look at the whole thread in a new browser, with a new IP address, not logged in, and it will still be missing. But, if you click the parent comment and open that up by itself then it is there.

It gets even more odd... That same comment *must* be visible to someone else because I had a recent comment, in a long thread, that had this happen and yet someone found it and replied. However, I checked with multiple IP addresses, various browsers, several different devices, and finally a phone. I used two VMs - I literally checked like a dozen different ways. The comment never once appeared directly but did appear, every time, when I clicked the parent comment's ID # and opened it as a single thread.

I'd not call that censorship. I'd call that a bug. I only noticed because I had refreshed the page and was unable to see my comment. I figured the thread was lagging and the database was flaky. So, I did some poking. I then noticed that the comment had attracted no moderation - I'm pretty good at knowing what comments I make will be moderated and in which direction. (The difference is that I don't really give two shits about the moderation. I just happen to see a pattern and appear to be able to make fairly accurate predictions.)

So, some folks may be thinking their being censored but it's more a glitch than anything else. I can probably find the comment easily enough - I recall it quite specifically. I'll refrain from posting it as I'm actually glad that it did end up the way it ended up - as I was scolding a rather famous person for logical inconsistencies and there's no need for others to be involved in it.

Oh, and had I made this comment earlier it might have been modded up. I'd have expected it to be insightful of interesting by someone's standards. However, the post is now way back on the 2nd page and will probably be on the 3rd by the time the average American is awake (more USians) so it's unlikely to be noticed. At best, it might get a couple of points but probably none at all. Though, by mentioning it, someone may mod it troll to be funny - or off-topic.

Either way, that was how I noticed the bug, what I found while investigating the bug, and why some people may think they're being censored when they're not actually being censored. It's hard telling but I figured I'd toss this into the mental mix. Other than the incident with the president, I don't know of anything being censored. If I did, well, I'd certainly not have kept screen shots. It's not like I regularly scrape the comments section and I kind of doubt that others do. At least not as a general rule.