Chatbots are the future of conversation intelligence, and can be used to stimulate human conversations. But just what do we expect from chatbots? On the one hand are those that firmly believe intelligent systems will dissipate the element of human interaction in years to come. On the other hand others revel in the delights of giving Siri instructions to challenge her intelligence and gauge the level of response.
Personally I feel that benefits for intelligent systems (chatbots) outweigh the disadvantages, but I am convinced that the advantages will depend on our behaviour and receptiveness to accept their merits. AI cynics were delighted when Microsoft’s Tay was morphed to demonstrate bad behaviour. At last there was proof to substantiate the argument in favour of the severe dangers of AI.
Users of Alexa were slightly disturbed by her random outbursts of laughter, to the extent that her code was re-written to disable a reaction when requested to do so, and to avoid reactions to false positives that try to trick her. This all leads to the question of the levels of humanness we expect from intelligent systems and chatbots, or more to the point the level of humanness we, as ‘humans’, are comfortable with accepting from ‘machines’.