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There is nothing about Eugene that is useful to the advancement of actual AI, to our understanding of intelligence. Advanced chatbots are a parlor trick, the sa

There is nothing about Eugene that is useful to the advancement of actual AI, to our understanding of intelligence. Advanced chatbots are a parlor trick, the same way that rabbit and hat tricks do not help us develop actual teleportation systems, however clever and convincing they might seem to credulous people. The difference between a trick and a technology, of course, is usefulness. Can your software do something useful, or is it solely aimed at deceiving people into believing it does? It was interesting to see how large quantities of journalists were simply channeling the ridiculous claims of the original press release, without an ounce of critical thinking --choosing instead to pontificate on the inexorable progress of AI. Yet another Dorian Nakamoto moment for the mainstream media.

chatbotcurious 12y ago
Could you explain why advances in chatbots aren't helpful for advances in artificial intelligence? Completely lay perspective but couldn't applying machine learning to a very large number of conversations (top down analysis) with a large library of base content (bottoms up) using AIML or another language start to create something useful for many sectors? Like customer support, education, entertainment, information retrieval navigating sites and apps...etc. I don't know much about the space but have been intrigued by chatbots since I was a kid.
- fchollet 12y ago
  For instance, that is the aim of IBM's Watson project. Certainly, if you create a program capable of answering useful questions (a "deep QA" system), then that is a praise-worthy effort. But that is not the aim of chatbots, which are not QA systems or automated support systems. In fact, advanced QA systems will probably never be convincingly human, as they are designed to be useful rather than to trick people. Watson is a good example of this.
ecopoesis 12y ago
If the machine can "deceive" you into thinking it's doing work, then it's doing work. It doesn't matter if there's a man who speaks Chinese in the room, or if there's a bunch of rulebooks about Chinese, they're functionally equivalent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- fchollet 12y ago
  The difference between an employee doing work and one deceiving you into thinking they're doing work is simple: one produces value, the other does not. Here, no useful information can be extracted from this Eugene chatbot. It cannot perform any useful task a human could perform or answer any useful question a human could answer. Which is what I was talking about when I mentioned usefulness. As a side note, I recently made a question answering engine which, although not very advanced and certainly not attempting to pass for a human, can provide you with useful information when asked general knowledge questions: http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-semantic-question-answering-engine.html http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-seman... The Chinese room experiment is not a relevant reference here, because this Eugene chatbot is in no way "functionally equivalent" to a human being. It is not even attempting to implement intelligence.
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    You keep assuming something about the turing test that is simply not the case. The Turing test has nothing to do with usefulness it doesn't even have to be correct. It just has to fool you into believing it's human. You are talking about your own metrics, fine but it's not what the test is about. I too hear Searles Chinese Room argument in your basic rant. And yes of course there are many useful things that can come out of something like this such as phishing attacks, hacking, honeypots even toys for kids.
  - Too 12y ago
    Define "useful" I bet a black hat SEO optimizer would find tons of auto generated content very useful. That kind of content is designed exactly to deceive both users and search bots that it is of value.
    - cardine 12y ago
      Eugene would not do a good job auto generating content that is useful for SEO and there are existing tools which do a very effective job auto generating content for SEO purposes.
- 12y ago
ThomPete 12y ago
I hear the echoes of the Chinese Room argument in your rant fchollet :) It seems like you are looking for something more than the turing test is really about: "The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer to questions; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine's ability to render words into audio." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
tragomaskhalos 12y ago
Eliza with a knobs on. The attempt to pre-explain the kookiness of its answers as being due to the quirky personality of "Eugene" was just laughable.

chatbotcurious 12y ago

Could you explain why advances in chatbots aren't helpful for advances in artificial intelligence? Completely lay perspective but couldn't applying machine learning to a very large number of conversations (top down analysis) with a large library of base content (bottoms up) using AIML or another language start to create something useful for many sectors? Like customer support, education, entertainment, information retrieval navigating sites and apps...etc. I don't know much about the space but have been intrigued by chatbots since I was a kid.

fchollet 12y ago
For instance, that is the aim of IBM's Watson project. Certainly, if you create a program capable of answering useful questions (a "deep QA" system), then that is a praise-worthy effort. But that is not the aim of chatbots, which are not QA systems or automated support systems. In fact, advanced QA systems will probably never be convincingly human, as they are designed to be useful rather than to trick people. Watson is a good example of this.

ecopoesis 12y ago

If the machine can "deceive" you into thinking it's doing work, then it's doing work. It doesn't matter if there's a man who speaks Chinese in the room, or if there's a bunch of rulebooks about Chinese, they're functionally equivalent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

fchollet 12y ago
The difference between an employee doing work and one deceiving you into thinking they're doing work is simple: one produces value, the other does not. Here, no useful information can be extracted from this Eugene chatbot. It cannot perform any useful task a human could perform or answer any useful question a human could answer. Which is what I was talking about when I mentioned usefulness. As a side note, I recently made a question answering engine which, although not very advanced and certainly not attempting to pass for a human, can provide you with useful information when asked general knowledge questions: http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-semantic-question-answering-engine.html http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-seman... The Chinese room experiment is not a relevant reference here, because this Eugene chatbot is in no way "functionally equivalent" to a human being. It is not even attempting to implement intelligence.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  You keep assuming something about the turing test that is simply not the case. The Turing test has nothing to do with usefulness it doesn't even have to be correct. It just has to fool you into believing it's human. You are talking about your own metrics, fine but it's not what the test is about. I too hear Searles Chinese Room argument in your basic rant. And yes of course there are many useful things that can come out of something like this such as phishing attacks, hacking, honeypots even toys for kids.
- Too 12y ago
  Define "useful" I bet a black hat SEO optimizer would find tons of auto generated content very useful. That kind of content is designed exactly to deceive both users and search bots that it is of value.
  - cardine 12y ago
    Eugene would not do a good job auto generating content that is useful for SEO and there are existing tools which do a very effective job auto generating content for SEO purposes.
12y ago

ThomPete 12y ago

I hear the echoes of the Chinese Room argument in your rant fchollet :) It seems like you are looking for something more than the turing test is really about: "The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer to questions; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine's ability to render words into audio." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

tragomaskhalos 12y ago

Eliza with a knobs on. The attempt to pre-explain the kookiness of its answers as being due to the quirky personality of "Eugene" was just laughable.