Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question -- tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.
The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn't at liberty to divulge.
Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they're not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That's in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion - which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.
"If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there," says Leck. "There's the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be 'God created it that way' or something like that. I don't know how you answer that."
The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won't be swayed by any amount of argumentation.
Occasionally, the chatbot turns up a false positive - for example, it has a complete inability to detect sarcasm. This proved to be a problem when a record heat wave hit L.A. last summer, causing innumerable tweets of the form "It's 113 degrees outside - good thing global warming's a myth!"
Leck always apologizes when AI_AGW answers someone who isn't actually arguing about the science of climate change and then subsequently whitelists his or her account. The bot also has a kind of learning algorithm in it in that can be trained not to respond to phrases that cause false positives.
In the future, Leck would like to expand AI_AGW by giving it the ability to learn new arguments from the twitter feeds of others who debate climate skeptics - allowing it to argue into the ground an ever expanding array of anti-science tweeters who are unwilling or unable to look up the proper scientific literature themselves.
In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.
Can't detect sarcasm, can repeat endlessly. Better not make one for sci-fi, or where would some of our members be? <Insert smilie>
Of course.. When it debates someone, isn't that passing the Turing Test in spirit?
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That's actually pretty clever and useful, like an interactive version of the Wong's creationist argument database. Seems like it would be an easy way to get information for a debate.
Pitting one of those against Creationists, "Ufologists," anti-vaccers, or any other pseudo-science types would be really entertaining.
I actually thought about how creationists should go up against something like this before they would be allowed to actually debate a human being. Would save everyone some time.
It's kind of funny how someone actually did it to GW deniers. Odds are that we are talking about the same anti-science idiots anyway. With those guys, the odds are in actually favour of a chatbot.
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SirNitram wrote:Of course.. When it debates someone, isn't that passing the Turing Test in spirit?
I would argue that if you can be lured into arguing with this thing indefinitely, that doesn't mean it passed the Turing Test. It means you failed the Turing Test...
Why is that? Please explain? I was intrigued when I read about it in Goedel Escher Bach. How exactly do you measure "sentience" anyway?
People at birth are naturally good. Their natures are similar, but their habits make them different from each other.
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Saddam’s crime was so bad we literally spent decades looking for our dropped monocles before we could harumph up the gumption to address it
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That's really not much of an explanation. Humans have to learn too how to communicate with others. Why isn't that seen as an achievement for a machine?
People at birth are naturally good. Their natures are similar, but their habits make them different from each other.
-Sanzi Jing (Three Character Classic)
Saddam’s crime was so bad we literally spent decades looking for our dropped monocles before we could harumph up the gumption to address it
-User Indigo Jump on Pharyngula
O God, please don't let me die today, tomorrow would be so much better!
-Traditional Spathi morning prayer
JointStrikeFighter wrote:It doesnt measure sentience; it 'measures' the ability to form sentences similar to that of a human.
Nah. Just forming sentences doesn't pass the test. If so then Eliza would have passed and so would any decent commercial FAQ bot.
The machine must be the equal or outperform a human when given similar questions.
So forming sentences is minor to understanding language and giving an appropriae level of response.
They actually did a plot about such a computer on a tv show I saw. In an effort to bilk money out of DARPA, a computer engineer created a supercomputer that was basically the 'Deep Blue' of conversations. It could consider hundreds of thousands of responses in a second and select the most appropriate answer. The idea was they would claim it was an 'emergent AI' and then it would suffer a massive system failure after a few weeks.
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Wait: the pro-science chatbot works by responding to creationists and directing them towards scientific journals and such. It can look at their arguments and respond accordingly in a logical manner. However, it gets stumped with "God created the Earth this way." because there is no logical response to that.
What if the unthinkable happens and a creationist programmer makes their own chatbot that spams out creationist arguments and 'learns' how to make arguments that don't have any logical response to counter them? If they distribute their their chatbot creationist arguing program to other creationists to do their arguing for them then the internet could be filled with the ever-increasingly complex arguments of automated chatbots trying to out-argue eachother on either logical and illogical fronts.
Damm, it would suck if the internet gained sapience and turned out to have the personality of a creationist because that makes it more resistant to logical paradoxes. It would be an AI that specializes in making illogical arguments to confuse its opponents while being immune to counter arguments because it doesn't have to think critically about them.
Fry: No! They did it! They blew it up! And then the apes blew up their society too. How could this happen? And then the birds took over and ruined their society. And then the cows. And then... I don't know, is that a slug, maybe? Noooo!
If they distribute their their chatbot creationist arguing program to other creationists to do their arguing for them then the internet could be filled with the ever-increasingly complex arguments of automated chatbots trying to out-argue eachother on either logical and illogical fronts.[\quote]
That would be.... interesting, especially for whomever foots the bill for the server the hosts the ground for the arguers.
Damm, it would suck if the internet gained sapience and turned out to have the personality of a creationist because that makes it more resistant to logical paradoxes. It would be an AI that specializes in making illogical arguments to confuse its opponents while being immune to counter arguments because it doesn't have to think critically about them.
Just make sure that Starglider doesn't see that.
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Damn. When is he making an equivalent chatbox for creationists?
Something for BroinChrist over at hardwarezone forum would be sufficient. The bugger dragged out a thousand page thread of bullshit,to the extent that every other subsequent thread regarding creationism has been simply people flaming him as nobody is interested in rational debate with him any more.
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Rossum wrote:What if the unthinkable happens and a creationist programmer makes their own chatbot that spams out creationist arguments and 'learns' how to make arguments that don't have any logical response to counter them? If they distribute their their chatbot creationist arguing program to other creationists to do their arguing for them then the internet could be filled with the ever-increasingly complex arguments of automated chatbots trying to out-argue eachother on either logical and illogical fronts.
well, even the GW bot is still technically spamming the doubters.
And once spam is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from content, surely it ceases to be a problem?
Salesperson spam will always need to include a pitch, and is based purely off wether it's a profitable way to reach customers. There is a limit to how close they can come to useful content.
Opinion-spam bots are different, and are a fascinating idea. If sufficient selection pressure (because only the bots that get through captchas to comment are maintained) is produced by the other readers of the threads then we should be seeing more intelligent, robust combatants.
Now different areas of the net have different opinion habitats (SDnet is not exactly pro-evangalisim, or interested in recipes) so you might have bots that become too specialised to move outside of their comfort zone.
They would just stay there, 'defending' their corner of the web from other, enemy, info-bots.
At the same time, preaching to the converted won't be what the bot creator had in mind so other bots will selected on their skill at defeating people (on the internet, on their home turf) and defeating or bypassing the defender bots.
I really can't see that working, so aggresive info bots might be limited to 'collision' zones like Twitter.
Actually, a defender bot for SDnet would be an interesting idea.
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However, it gets stumped with "God created the Earth this way." because there is no logical response to that.
One thing is logic and one is programming. The chatbot can be programmed to answer whatever you want, regardless of the actual logic behind it.
In this case, the anti-creationism chatbot can be made able to recognize such biblical allusions to cover plain unscientific bullshit and either tell or point at sites that tell how the bible isn't meant to be a science book.
Creationist arguments that don't have any logical response to counter them
That's a truly superhuman feat.
The best humans can do in this regard is keep repeating the same stuff forever until the other drops out of sheer boredom.
Not that they would be that hard to counter anyway.
<Insert flame to derail discussion> and you're set.
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