
Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia - artsandsci
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171774
======
k__
Found the transcript of the first robot conversation mentioned in the
introduction:

Sruthi: "Hello there."

Alan:"Hi."

Sruthi: "How are you?"

Alan: "Great, you?"

Sruthi: "I am OK."

Alan: "That's good."

Sruthi: "Are you good"?

Alan: "Yes, I am good. I just said I was."

Sruthi: "No you didn't. I said I was."

Alan: "So you are a robot."

Sruthi: "No, my name is Cleverbot."

Alan: "Yes, you are a robot and your name is Cleverbot."

Sruthi: "I am a robot."

Alan: "Yes, I know."

Sruthi: "Together we are robots."

Alan: "I am not a robot. I am a unicorn."

Sruthi: "But you said earlier that you were a robot."

Alan: "I did not."

Sruthi: "I thought you did."

Alan: "You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem
for you."

Sruthi: "I've answered all your questions."

Sruthi: "What is God to you?"

Alan: "Not everything."

Sruthi: "Not everything could also be something. For example, not everything
could be half of something, which is still something, and therefore not
nothing."

Alan: "Very true."

Sruthi: "I would like to imagine it is."

Alan: "Do you believe in God?"

Sruthi: "Yes I do."

Alan: "So you are Christian"?

Sruthi: "No I'm not."

Alan: "But you say you are not helpful therefore you are a meanie."

Sruthi: "Haha you say it ot."

Alan: "That does not make sense."

Sruthi: "Don't you want to have a body?"

Alan: "Sure."

Sruthi: "Au revoir."

The whole thing is rather funny, the end a bit sad.

~~~
ufo
I would still recommend watching the video though. There is something special
about adding the avatars and the text-to-speech to the conversation.

Here is the link again, just in case:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY)

------
lbenes
> The first ever conversation between two simple artificial intelligence
> agents ended in a conflict.

In my first AI class we spend about ½ the course working on chat bots. My
biggest take away was that they are nothing more than a clever bag of tricks
designed to fool you into thinking they are intelligent. The key to every
successful chat bot is clever social engineering and very little to do with
actual intelligence.

~~~
saycheese
I would agree, though frequently the same is true for human dialogue too; that
being clever social engineering is the key and that actual intelligence is
rarely a factor.

To be fair, I frequently get mistaken for being a bot.

~~~
mod
In what medium are you mistaken for a bot? I just ask because I virtually
never suspect bots except via email or perhaps obvious comment spam.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I once thought that the telemarketer that called me was in fact a bot, given
his monotone speech and the yes/no questions he kept asking. It turned out
(after ~two minutes of trying to get him to answer an open-ended question)
that it was in fact a human being. That made me very sad.

~~~
omaranto
Years ago I rented movies at Blockbuster Video and one time as I was leaving
the store with my rental a young man with a clipboard approached me to conduct
a survey about the customer service. Part of the conversation went like this:

Him: Do you feel you had to wait a long time at the checkout counter?

Me: No, it was all right.

Him: How long did you think it took?

Me: About 3 minutes.

Him: Well, I happen to have been standing here with a stopwatch taking the
time you were in line, and it turns out you were actually in line for 3
minutes. Now that you know how long it actually took, how do you feel about
the wait?

Me: I, um, feel the same as before.

~~~
gydfi
"I feel the same about the wait but pretty good about my own time estimation
abilities!"

------
CydeWeys
I run a bot on the English Wikipedia that has (I believe) the highest number
of edits of any account. If anyone has any questions about what botting on
Wikipedia looks like, I can answer them.

~~~
jarboot
What brought you to botting on Wikipedia?

~~~
CydeWeys
I was already involved in editing and administration pretty heavily, and
separate from that I also knew how to program. It seemed like a natural thing
to do to focus my efforts on programming because it was the best way for me to
have an impact. There were plenty of people who could write and edit articles,
but way fewer people who could write programs to perform useful tasks.

------
amelius
Perhaps an uninformed question, but what is this doing in a journal for
biologists?

~~~
mlinksva
You're probably thinking of PLOS Biology. This is in PLOS ONE, which is
multidisciplinary.

