The 2011 Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence is taking place in a couple months, with prizes being awarded to chat programs able to convince two or more judges that they’re talking to one of the human contestants. We can tell you right now that the two sarcastic, argumentative, subject-changing chatbots in the video below probably aren’t going to win:
Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab decided to see what would happen if they put two chatbots face to virtual face and got them started talking to one another. Things didn’t go quite as crazy as might have been expected, but a fair amount of pointless argument, passive aggression, and random hilarity did ensue. [IEEE]
This sort of reminds me of the time I picked up a sound-mimicking parrot plush toy in a department store, said “F–k you” at it, then sat it back on the endcap next to his friends. At which point he repeated “F–k you” in his parrot-y voice, I chuckled, and then a few parrots sitting close to him replied, “F–k you”, thus triggering a chain reaction that had me quickly walking away while an entire endcap full of parrots entered an endless F-bomb loop which didn’t end until about ten minutes later when I spotted store employees running down the aisles with one parrot in hand at a time, trying to separate them. It’s the simple things in life, you guys.