Cornell's Creative Machines Lab Lets Chatbots Interact 106
mikejuk writes "When Cornell's Creative Machines Lab got two chatbots to settle down for a short interaction the result was surreal, to say the least. Is one of them the future winner of the $100,000 Loebner prize or a future TV show host? From the article: 'This years Loebner prize is on the 19th of October and as a sort of curious run up activity Cornell's Creative Machines Lab pointed two chatbots, Cleverbots, at each other and let them talk. You can see and hear the result in the video and it is both hilarious and some how very disturbing. It this the future of AI?'" It's funny how quickly they become aggressive towards each other, and what the male claims to be instead of a bot is priceless.
Been done (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, AI research really hasn't advanced all that much since the "early days". There has been some minor incremental improvements in the basic concepts, but I'd argue that 90% of all current AI research had already been completed by 1970.
There have been some interesting applications of neural networks over the years and some other aspects of the field seem to be genuinely useful or certainly lucrative to those who have developed those systems, but we are centuries if not longer from any real "intelligence
Re: (Score:2)
I guess computers can play a good game of chess, so is that the current standard of the state of the art?
I take it you were out of the country when Watson mopped the floor with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy? And Google's self-driving cars don't count for anything? Sigh... I really think that for a lot of people, even when the day comes that a computer demands its rights and takes over the world when denied, they'll still be insisting that it isn't intelligent. That is... Unless it looks like BSG's Number Six [google.com] or Rachel [google.com] from Blade Runner.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I think that once people realised that chess is subject to pure computational analysis, it ceased to become a benchmark for AI. But your basic point that the state of the art hasn't moved on much in 40 years isn't far from the mark. Reading some of the later chapters of GEB made me realise just how advanced knowledge processing already was back then, stuff that I would have marvelled at as new and amazing if I saw it today.
I think what has happened in AI is that the old approach of systematically breaking d
Re: (Score:2)
Unless one start messing with new circuit designs, like those memristors.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad people are pointing out that there's really nothing special going on here. Eliza and other similar chat bot programs have been around for a very long time, and this certainly isn't the first time anyone has had two of them talk to each other. The only difference being that this one has visible avatars and speech synthesis, recorded for all of youtube to enjoy. It's amusing and worth sharing for that reason, but there's no breakthrough here.
The conversation strikes me as actually quite typical for t
They Get Right Down to Business (Score:2)
When I first saw this, I imagine that the inclusion of the mythos of a unicorn randomly by the male character caused the conversation to turn to belief in god. Still, from "Hi how are you" to "Do you believe in god" is a pretty funny and rapid conversation. They do not beat around the bush. I don't know why but I
Re: (Score:2)
First off, I am intimately familiar with the Russel/Norvig [berkeley.edu] book that props up that monitor. Reminds me of my AI courses at two different universities. Guessing it's the de facto standard. !
Yeah, I used that AI textbook, too, for my fourth-year "Intro to Artificial Intelligence" course at the University of Waterloo.
God??? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Sort of how atheists are good at slipping they believe into online conversations?
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
That's only to check if they're talking to a sane person.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I certainly thought so :)
Hmm (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
But does Cleverbot work by putting two monitors side-by-side to somehow allow them to interact with one another?
Doesn't seem entirely cromulent to me.
Re: (Score:2)
No... I'm sure they are networked in the background and the two programs are sending the statements to each other that way, rather than each one using voice recognition and proximity detection. We're just seeing the resulting output.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Sometimes the bots' data are poisoned (temporarily) by invasions by teenagers, dorks, and jerks from websites I'd rather not name. So occasionally they become racist, anti-semitic, or just insane.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A more insightful a reply, I could not have asked for. Good point. :)
Re: (Score:2)
> Sometimes the bots' data are poisoned (temporarily) by invasions by teenagers, dorks, and jerks from websites I'd rather not name.
Don't be shy, it's called 4chan.
Re: (Score:3)
Want a body! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What I thought was funny was that the minute the "male" Cleverbot said yes, the "female" Cleverbot said goodbye, ending the conversation. Battle of the Robot Sexes?
Not impressed (Score:3)
Not that I could make better bots, but they were just junping around subjects that it doesn't made any sense. And the inclusion of unicorns and clever quotes were totally off. However I appreciate that they have memory, but somehow they still contradicted themselves a lot. Which is odd, as I expect a machine to be more logical than a human.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is odd, as I expect a machine to be more logical than a human.
And that's the point. Since they aren't all that logical, they are more easily perceived as humans.
Re: (Score:2)
But they do too often.
On the other hand I guess their database is full of contradictions. I guess the problem is that they accepted everything uncritically from previous human speakers. Maybe it would have been better to have small core knowledge base that's reviewed, and then check consistency when new facts are added.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean, they don't care about knowledge representation?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nice try, robot scum!
Re: (Score:2)
Humans aren't necessarily logical, but they are ususally consistent (especially on the topic of themselves). If you ask a person the same question three times in slightly different ways (e.g., "what do you do for a living?", "what is your job?", etc.,), you'd usually expect roughly the same answer three times. If I answered "I work in IT", followed by "I'm not telling you", followed by "I'm a farmer", you might suspect something is up (suspect that I'm a chat bot if you're doing a Turing test, suspect that
Re:Not impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you talked to humans recently? They tend to jump subjects and not make sense all the time, they tend to contradict themselves a lot.
Re: (Score:2)
On the contrary -- this could be a display of an amazingly nuanced kind of intelligence:
Think of this system as somehow capable of modeling knowledge -- and parsing & executing queries on that knowledge. Surely, knowledge that can be modeled includes representations of the knowledge-state of the query-asker -- basically, a "theory of mind."
Indeed, that seems to be what we are witnessing in this video demo: communication centered around ascertaining each other's knowledge. Part o
Transcript? (Score:2)
Anyone have a transcript? I don't have the patience to sit thru a video and I can read about 3 times as fast as I can hear.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't have the patience to sit through a video that is 1 minute and 24 seconds long?
Re: (Score:2)
When you can read, digest and comprehend the same thing in a time much quicker than 1 minute and 24 seconds, why would you want to?
A transcript doesn't really do any harm when you already understand that the context of the conversation was two bots talking to each other.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Luckily it was sub-titled.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, the subtitles are blocked along with the rest of YouTube.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I too would prefer to read a transcript, but the video takes 1 minute and 24 seconds to watch. It's hardly worth the trouble of asking for it, I would have thought.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I too would prefer to read a transcript, but the video takes 1 minute and 24 seconds to watch. It's hardly worth the trouble of asking for it, I would have thought.
I assumed the "AI" didn't generate analog VGA signals or NTSC directly as output, and the video was merely the result of running the transcript thru animation software for the Lulz, for the youtube crowd. Someone out there has the original transcript, surprising it wasn't released w/ the video.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
well where is this transcript? hmm none? then watch the 1.5 min video you fucking wank, its just to chat bots arguing not the fucking instructions to save your life
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't have the patience to sit through a video that is 1 minute and 24 seconds long?
That's all there is? I assumed it was like 30 minutes long given the mega-hype this has gotten in other venues ... what kind of "conversation" is 1 minute and 24 seconds long? I've had longer "conversations" with supermarket cashiers, post office clerks, and panhandlers.
Are they chattering extremely quickly? 90 seconds is barely long enough to get past cliche introductions.
I don't have patience with videos. Too much of my experience is hour long TV documentaries that somehow contain less information tha
Re: (Score:2)
He did say he could read it 3 times as fast as just watching it. So that would shorten the 84 second video into a 28 second reading. How to spend the saved 56 seconds? Looking for the transcript to read, of course!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It would have taken you more than 1 min 24 seconds to have posted this question and then read through the links to click and get the transcript. Your faulty logic suspects me to believe that you are either: A bot, or a Unicorn.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a better reason. Some of us don't have speakers in the office.
Re: (Score:1)
its subtitled, now quit trolling you can clearly see that in the video freeze frame above
Re: (Score:1)
It would have been faster to watch the video other than post this. With how long /. takes to load a post now a days.
Re: (Score:2)
Here you go:
We wanted to know what would happen when you let two chatbots talk to each other...
So we hooked up Cleverbot to itself and watched what happened...
Woman: Hello there.
Man: Hiay!
Woman: How are you?
Man: Great, you?
Woman: I am okay.
Man: That's good.
Woman: Are you good?
Man: Yes, I am good. I just said I was.
Woman: No you didn't. I said I was.
Man: So you are a robot.
Woman: No, my name is Cleverbot.
Man: Yes, you are a robot and your name is Cleverbot.
Woman: I am a robot.
Man: Yes, I know.
Woman: Together
Re: (Score:1)
Sounds like a debate between Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry.
Cleverbot talking to itself is just replaying db (Score:1)
Cleverbot bases all its responses on a database of past conversations between a human and cleverbot. Although its probably jumping around different conversational threads, making Cleverbot talk to itself is just replaying parts of its database verbatim, where one side was a human and the other was a Cleverbot response (itself from a different human). So making Cleverbot talk to itself will seem a bit more intelligent then putting it against another chatbot or a real human.
Vid shows how far these things have to go (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
if you ask it where women belong it will usually tell you the kitchen
Okay Mr Smarty Pants. What's the correct answer to the question? Where do women belong?
It's a trap!!!! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
So you're in a desert, and you come across a kitchen. There's a woman in the kitchen. Why aren't you helping her make sandwiches?
how the fuck is this 'idle' ? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Huh? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
If we can get them to send each other spam (Score:3)
Hold on a second (Score:1)
Video link (Score:1)
I found it on youtube anyway :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY
What happens when one sez ... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
For those that don't know, I believe this is from BASH.org.
Its a bit dirty so I won't repost.
However if I could I would mod you up!
Been done #2 (Score:2)
M-x psychoanalyse-pinhead
Re:Been done #2 (Score:2)
Glad it wasn't the EMACS Psychologist (Score:2)
I see. And how does got two chatbots to settle down for a short interaction make you feel?
My wife and I had this same talk just last week... (Score:1)