You’ve probably heard of the Turing Test. You may have also read John’s story on Salon about the Loebner prize which purports to carry out the Turing test each year and award prizes. People labor over programs that try to pass for human, and fail miserably. Real AI guys have thrown up their hands in disgust and have disowned both the Loebner prize and apparently the Turing test itself.
But it appears they have all gone about it in the wrong way…
It’s actually an easy problem to solve.
Instead of doing the hard work of writing a program that is smart enough to pass for human, you approach the problem from the other side. If you’re stuck with stupid software, just find stupid people to interact with it and viola! Success! And if there’s one thing the Internet has in spades, it’s stupidity.
This is what happened when someone took the most well-known primitive AI program, Eliza, and programmed it with stock phrases used by supposed women (who are more often than not men) in sex chatrooms. The result: Jenny18 (warning: contains adult language, adult situations, and near toxic levels of testosterone and desperation-induced stupidity).
In the Salon story I talked about sextalk being an obvious area where bot technology would pay off.
Even so I’m surprised by the inanity of those chat transcripts–the few that I read. I mean, one can only take so much of that stuff. It reminds me of the story about male turkeys that will try to mount a stick that has a plastic female turkey head on the end of it.