Cornell AI students intro 2 robots to each other, and a viral video results
A demo of two robots chatting that a pair of Cornell University Ph.D. students cobbled together for an artificial intelligence course has exploded into a viral video over the past week that has amassed nearly 1.4 million views on YouTube.
The video, “AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other” (see below) is based on a Web-based chatbot called Cleverbot that the students gussied up with a text-to-speech capability and a couple of avatars. In essence, the chatbot is yapping with itself.
The sparkling dialogue between the male and female bots starts off cordially enough, with a “Hello there” and a “Hiay,” but quickly devolves over 94 seconds into a spat, with one bot spitting out “Together we are robots” and the other responding oddly: “I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.” Eventually, the discussion turns to religion and ends on a French note. (If the researchers could find and mix in Microsoft’s old, unintentional potty-mouth Santa bot they could really spark an interesting conversation!)
The Cornell Chronicle quotes one of the students, Hod Lipson, saying: “It was just an afternoon hack. It went viral in 24 hours and took us completely by surprise.” The story says that the researchers might expand their efforts to include additional robots and longer conversations, that they suspect might even wind up resulting in robot lies as the robots learn as they converse.
A PC World blog post says that the Cornell team has submitted its work to the Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence, which will award $100K to the first team to come up with a computer whose responses are indistinguishable from a human’s.
BACKGROUND: Whirlwind tour of computing and telecom’s top honors, awards and prizes
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In exploring this story, I gave Chatbot a whirl myself and wound up in a brief and inane conversation.
Me: Do you read Network World?
Chatbot: Sometimes
Me: What do you like best about it?
Chatbot: You
Me: Gosh
Chatbot: What’s wrong?
Me: Nothing, just a little embarrassed.
Chatbot: Haha, cute. So, are you ever going to eat that pickle like you said you would.
Me: Huh?
Chat with Bot, I mean Bob, on Google+
