> because they often use huge databases of real human responses to construct their own
Honestly, this often seems to be the conversational gambit of human beings.
Coming up with genuinely interesting conversation seems to be a task that takes too much effort for most everyday interactions.
Whether it be standard small chat, quoting cultural media, or reciting social group in-jokes, much of human interaction seems to also take a "bags of tricks" approach.
But how does yet another "bags of tricks" chatbot help to advance the field of AI? The Turing test and projects like this are a distraction on what should be our true goal of creating general AI. There is a large amount of evidence in neuroscience on the plasticity and uniformity of the neocortex, all pointing to a single algorithm for general intelligence.
I would much rather see a prize for finding more general purpose algorithms and using them to create general purpose AIs. Off the top of my head, show a picture a animal, building, logo, face, word, etc., and be able to pick out that same type from another group of pictures. Google has already demonstrated that we can teach a computer to recognize a cat with thousands of pictures and deep learning models, how about just one? The more general the test, the better, it should also be able to be trained to play new games and recognize sounds as well as pictures. Unlike another useless,specialized chatbot, this would be better aligned with Xprize's goals of "encouraging technological development that could benefit mankind."
That may be true, but at best you would just get animal level intelligence. We haven't refined our algorithms like evolution has over millions of years with natural selection, and we have far less computing power and far less training time than real brains.
Most animals can't learn language, or play games, and aren't very intelligent.
I recently watched a video with Stanford AI researchers talking about how the general case of searching for an object like a coffee cup in office is still an unsolved problem. At the same time, my German Shepherd with a pea sized mammalian brain has learned to pick up garbage when we go on nature hikes. After pointing out enough plastic bags, cups, cans, etc., she's somehow learned the concept of trash in the forest and will often find it on her own and bring it to me. Advancing AI to this level, would be a worthy goal.
Honestly, this often seems to be the conversational gambit of human beings.
Coming up with genuinely interesting conversation seems to be a task that takes too much effort for most everyday interactions.
Whether it be standard small chat, quoting cultural media, or reciting social group in-jokes, much of human interaction seems to also take a "bags of tricks" approach.