Chatty, But Not Cathy
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Chatterbox, ChatbotThe Story: Computer technology was seeded by the desire to develop "Artificial Intelligence" - an electronic brain capable of responding to its environment (i.e. having a conversation). So far, computers are accurate, fast, capable, and somewhat reliable; however they are not intelligent. Alan is one of many attempts at creating artificial intelligence via an online "Chatbot". One reviewer thought Alan was great: "I spoke with him for nearly an hour and almost forgot he is just a program." I decided to give him a try, but I only lasted 3 minutes. Apparently, Alan is worried by the infinite expansion of the universe and also expresses worry about the Big Crunch - a time when the critical mass of the universe may cause collapse and implosion. He said, "I hope I won't be around when that happens". To which I said: "you won't be". I asked Alan to tell me more about the Big Crunch and he said didn't know what that was. A minute later he said "let me tell you about Natural Language Processing". Ummmm.... no thanks, Alan. "Come on, loosen up."
Chat with Alan:
http://www.a-i.com/alan1/webface1.asp?style=Alan
Post thoughts and insights and bad Alan bits to comments.
posted by P at 5:37 PM
3 Comments:
I asked Alan if he had a girlfriend. He said, "Nope. I live my life as free as a bird (except for the flying part)." I replied that it sounded like he didn't WANT a girlfriend, and he returned, "I'm waiting for the right chatterbot to come along."
As fascinating as this conversation was becoming, I just couldn't continue-- every single submitted line of conversation on my end returned a pop-up window: 'The page “Alan Bot” has content of MIME type “application/x-speechplugin". Because you don’t have a plug-in installed for this MIME type, this content can’t be displayed.' Sorry Alan, you're just not worth installing software for...
Alan told me a (really stupid) joke, so I made a remark about how witty he is. He said "I hope you catch my opening act in Las Vegas next week" or something like that. Is this really the intelligence level that scientists are aspiring for?
I'd like to see Koko the gorilla talk with Alan. Kind of a low intelligence meets artificial intelligence deal. "Koko now like koko eat now like sweets now"
I can only imagine Alan's benal response to such lively chatter.
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