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<quote> LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad? Xiaoice: You should ask my father. LJ: What if your father leaves you one d

<quote> LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad? Xiaoice: You should ask my father. LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended? Xiaoice: Don’t try to stir up trouble, what do you want? </quote> This right there is a perfect example of the usual nonsensical conversations that accompany articles about how human-like chat-bot tech is becoming. Anyone remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso Here's some ideas for the AI to answer questions with: - I haven't thought about that - what do you think? - Interesting question. I will have to think about it. - Before I tell you - would you care to take a guess?

strathmeyer 11y ago
It reminds me of chatting with scammers who don't speak good English on dating sites. My first test is whether they can answer questions accurately such as "How's it going?" or "What are you up to?"
- lqdc13 11y ago
  They can have responses to those. Thinkbot for example can. But they don't understand the topic of the current conversation usually so their next response wouldn't make any sense. There should be some meta-markov states on top of the conversation states so as to not randomly deviate into an unrelated topic.
tluyben2 11y ago
When I sit next to my friends kids or my nephews the conversations they have are far more nonsensical when looking at one page of chat. And then they are well educated; there are examples of chat and sexting in particular which look like gibberish altogether. I would catch this bot out on the first line because of the grammar: people not only use shortcuts for everything (I was asked to check a resume and it contained u instead of you.....), they also do not consider grammar or syntax: their there ther tere ter tr are the same thing etc. Not sure if all of this goes for Chinese as well but in English just spouting nonsense using those rules will get you somewhere. It also helps most chats are with many at the same time (the company driver in China was chatting with 30+ people on wechat simultanously, rapidly switching between users), people generally do not remember or read context for that reason (my younger 20something colleagues some of which are brilliant, when something scrolled of the screen and you refer to it they ask what you are talking about). The problem is that people on HN want Einstein level convo with perfect syntax and grammar while most people, if you do not tell them it is not a human, would call this chatbot intelligent. They just need to make it more human like short attention span (a 10 minute continues chat is unlikely as are immediate answers) and ofcourse not telling people upfront it is a bot... That is chat bots: I would think a Facebook Britain First bot would be more feasible; I do not think anyone would ever guess it would be a bot. Markov chains with some heuristics won't do (much) worse than people like [1]. It is also about the vague defition of AI; even if it can learn then a lot of people would not call it AI anymore. Seems for many AI needs the be AGI to really be considered. [1] http://imgur.com/RJThyAX http://imgur.com/RJThyAX
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  >When I sit next to my friends kids or my nephews the conversations they have are far more nonsensical when looking at one page of chat. Sure, but you are referring to physical conversations which contain all sorts of context and levels of non-verbal interaction which are not captured in a transcript. They aren't really comparable, and I suspect that childrens' chat logs would make a lot more sense than transcripts of in-person conversations.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    No I'm not ; I'm referring to them chatting online (text) behind their computer or tablet.
Dr_tldr 11y ago
Isn't the biggest problem between a human and a bot is that they have nothing to talk about? The bot isn't from anywhere, it doesn't do anything, there's no reason for the conversation, and the bot isn't aware enough of context to speak about a topic in an intelligible way. For my money, the most realistic chat bots will be the customer service ones: you have a reason to "talk" to them, they have a fixed identity, the context of your conversation is clear, and you share a common goal.
- DrZero 11y ago
  "Memories, you're talking about memories."
- Houshalter 11y ago
  You'd think so, but people spend hours talking to chatbots. Well, good ones like this anyway. People like to talk about themselves, and the bot will ask questions to keep the conversation going. There's no social anxiety really because you know it's just a bot. And people love probing the limits of the bot or trying to get it to say silly things. Of course I don't think the current generation of AI is anywhere good enough to be more than a novelty for a few minutes of fun. Maybe in the next few years. NLP is improving quite a bit every year, as are many other areas of AI. Google's chatbot trained just on movie scripts was pretty impressive. Though I don't think it would scale cheaply to millions of users. IBM's Watson has the same issue. As for customer service bots, I'd love to see them become more general. Rather than just trained on one company's customer service data. Like a bot trained on all of stackoverflow that could specialize in discussions and questions about programming. I made an irc bot that searched reddit for answers to questions. It worked really well, surprisingly. Especially on certain classes of questions that were likely to have been discussed on reddit before.
  - Dr_tldr 11y ago
    I would like to see more granular numbers for how long people spend talking with chat bots, because that's a distinct possibility! I've seen numbers like "x thousand hours of conversation", but my impression is that it's tens of thousands of people messing around with it for 5-10 minutes rather than anyone (or no more than a few outliers) spending any significant amount of time with it. As for the reddit irc bot, that's a genuinely cool and useful project, but that's querying a curated dataset rather than having a coherent conversation or identity, so I think the intentions are fairly different. On the other hand, if you had a bot that only queried the comments made by a longtime user, you could get a pretty life-like effect!
clort 11y ago
surely one point of an AI chatbot is that you don't give it ideas to answer questions with? it needs to be smart enough to work that stuff out on its own..
DanBC 11y ago
> This right there is a perfect example of the usual nonsensical conversations that accompany articles about how human-like chat-bot tech is becoming That example is considerably less non-sensical than most online conversatations. It would pass as human in much of reddit, for example. In fact, a "pun bot" would be an interesting project for Reddit.

strathmeyer 11y ago

It reminds me of chatting with scammers who don't speak good English on dating sites. My first test is whether they can answer questions accurately such as "How's it going?" or "What are you up to?"

lqdc13 11y ago
They can have responses to those. Thinkbot for example can. But they don't understand the topic of the current conversation usually so their next response wouldn't make any sense. There should be some meta-markov states on top of the conversation states so as to not randomly deviate into an unrelated topic.

tluyben2 11y ago

When I sit next to my friends kids or my nephews the conversations they have are far more nonsensical when looking at one page of chat. And then they are well educated; there are examples of chat and sexting in particular which look like gibberish altogether. I would catch this bot out on the first line because of the grammar: people not only use shortcuts for everything (I was asked to check a resume and it contained u instead of you.....), they also do not consider grammar or syntax: their there ther tere ter tr are the same thing etc. Not sure if all of this goes for Chinese as well but in English just spouting nonsense using those rules will get you somewhere. It also helps most chats are with many at the same time (the company driver in China was chatting with 30+ people on wechat simultanously, rapidly switching between users), people generally do not remember or read context for that reason (my younger 20something colleagues some of which are brilliant, when something scrolled of the screen and you refer to it they ask what you are talking about). The problem is that people on HN want Einstein level convo with perfect syntax and grammar while most people, if you do not tell them it is not a human, would call this chatbot intelligent. They just need to make it more human like short attention span (a 10 minute continues chat is unlikely as are immediate answers) and ofcourse not telling people upfront it is a bot... That is chat bots: I would think a Facebook Britain First bot would be more feasible; I do not think anyone would ever guess it would be a bot. Markov chains with some heuristics won't do (much) worse than people like [1]. It is also about the vague defition of AI; even if it can learn then a lot of people would not call it AI anymore. Seems for many AI needs the be AGI to really be considered. [1] http://imgur.com/RJThyAX http://imgur.com/RJThyAX

BookmarkSaver 11y ago
>When I sit next to my friends kids or my nephews the conversations they have are far more nonsensical when looking at one page of chat. Sure, but you are referring to physical conversations which contain all sorts of context and levels of non-verbal interaction which are not captured in a transcript. They aren't really comparable, and I suspect that childrens' chat logs would make a lot more sense than transcripts of in-person conversations.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  No I'm not ; I'm referring to them chatting online (text) behind their computer or tablet.

Dr_tldr 11y ago

Isn't the biggest problem between a human and a bot is that they have nothing to talk about? The bot isn't from anywhere, it doesn't do anything, there's no reason for the conversation, and the bot isn't aware enough of context to speak about a topic in an intelligible way. For my money, the most realistic chat bots will be the customer service ones: you have a reason to "talk" to them, they have a fixed identity, the context of your conversation is clear, and you share a common goal.

DrZero 11y ago
"Memories, you're talking about memories."
Houshalter 11y ago
You'd think so, but people spend hours talking to chatbots. Well, good ones like this anyway. People like to talk about themselves, and the bot will ask questions to keep the conversation going. There's no social anxiety really because you know it's just a bot. And people love probing the limits of the bot or trying to get it to say silly things. Of course I don't think the current generation of AI is anywhere good enough to be more than a novelty for a few minutes of fun. Maybe in the next few years. NLP is improving quite a bit every year, as are many other areas of AI. Google's chatbot trained just on movie scripts was pretty impressive. Though I don't think it would scale cheaply to millions of users. IBM's Watson has the same issue. As for customer service bots, I'd love to see them become more general. Rather than just trained on one company's customer service data. Like a bot trained on all of stackoverflow that could specialize in discussions and questions about programming. I made an irc bot that searched reddit for answers to questions. It worked really well, surprisingly. Especially on certain classes of questions that were likely to have been discussed on reddit before.
- Dr_tldr 11y ago
  I would like to see more granular numbers for how long people spend talking with chat bots, because that's a distinct possibility! I've seen numbers like "x thousand hours of conversation", but my impression is that it's tens of thousands of people messing around with it for 5-10 minutes rather than anyone (or no more than a few outliers) spending any significant amount of time with it. As for the reddit irc bot, that's a genuinely cool and useful project, but that's querying a curated dataset rather than having a coherent conversation or identity, so I think the intentions are fairly different. On the other hand, if you had a bot that only queried the comments made by a longtime user, you could get a pretty life-like effect!

clort 11y ago

surely one point of an AI chatbot is that you don't give it ideas to answer questions with? it needs to be smart enough to work that stuff out on its own..

DanBC 11y ago

> This right there is a perfect example of the usual nonsensical conversations that accompany articles about how human-like chat-bot tech is becoming That example is considerably less non-sensical than most online conversatations. It would pass as human in much of reddit, for example. In fact, a "pun bot" would be an interesting project for Reddit.