February 24, 2004
Text-Porn on Little Screens — an AI Sweet Spot?
Speaking of chatterbots… A BBC technology correspondent is eager to report that text-porn bots have passed the Turing test. The article begins by lumping apples and oranges together:
At first glance spam, pornographic text messages and video games are not contributing much to human development.
Great, thanks. But he goes on to describe how AI’s have been known to fool users, and is particularly taken with Natachata, a chatbot that operates in adult SMS text chatrooms.
I’m not too surprised these bots can manage to seem human, when the interaction occurs only once every minute or so, with only a few words of text displayed at a time on a little LCD screen, to people who really, really want to believe. What’s a bit more surprising is that people actually pay over $1 per SMS message for this.
And, apparently it does take a rocket scientist to pull this off.
February 24th, 2004 at 12:51 am
I’m not surprised either that “about 5% who realise it is a computer and use it even more because of that”. Consider Herbert H. Clark’s theory of disembodied language above the age-old theory of suspension of disbelief:
‘Disembodied language is language that is not being produced by an actual speaker at the moment it is being interpretated. That type of language is all around us-as written language and mechanized speech- and yet it is poorly understood. My proposal is that we interpret disembodied language in two layers of coordinated activity. In the first layer, we join the producer of the disembodied langugage in creating a pretense. In the second layer, which represents that joint pretense, we communciation with a virtual partner. I argue that layering like this is recruited whenever we interpret forms of disembodied communication in computers.’
Many of the users of interactive entertainment would, I’m sure, be exercising this agreement. Judges at the Loebner competition however, by the nature of their role, can’t really invest or assist the creation as such.
As for using bots for sex – I’m not surprised that sextalk can be seamlessly achieved by a robot. Much to say there (and I will, in my creative work on bots, humans and sex).
February 24th, 2004 at 10:20 am
Christy, please let us know about your creative work when it’s available, we’d love to see it.
Is the word “robot” generally used interchangably with “bot”, for software chatterbots? I’ve seen people do this here and there. Obviously “bot” is derived from “robot”, but isn’t “robot” usually meant to refer to a physical agent?
Nick’s latest post makes me imagine, Text-Porn on Teletypes…
February 25th, 2004 at 5:03 am
Yes, they are interchangeable though you’re right – robot is usually an embodied mechanism whereas bots usually refer to software agents. I couldn’t say at the top of my head when ‘bots came into vogue (maybe someone out there can?) The mix of usage is probably, for some, similar to my reasons: more know what a robot is and less what a bot is. The interchange is just to make sure the reader is not facing too many obstacles in understanding the subject. I should bite the bullet and use bot appropriately!
As for my creative work – it’ll be another couple of years before it’s out there (I’m part-time). But the basic jist is this: the creative work is a print story coupled with a chatbot programmed as a character from the story. The creative concerns are unconscious action, sex and interactivity and so on. The theory part is modeling narrative over the two mediums. So, yes I’ll let you know when it’s time and thank you for the positive invite.
March 28th, 2004 at 7:59 am
Nice
all,
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xMax