(2016-10-24) Ohno The Ideal Chatbot Is Not A Butler Or A Puppy But An Elder God
John Ohno: The ideal chatbot is not a butler or a puppy, but an elder god.
I love chatbots, and I love chatbot communities: they intersect with experimental writing, performance art, and ‘punk’ communities to a much greater extent than traditional AI communities, and constitute melting pots. Chatbots are interesting to these people because they are a tool for playing with language and identity in an interactive and public way.
Another kind of chatbot community has appeared, only in the past few years.
These are commerce-driven, mostly clueless pseudo-entrepreneurs who heard someone say “bot is the new app” and decided to start writing bots, without looking at the history of the form. As a result, the state of the art in commercial bots looks a lot like it did twenty years ago: it looks like AIML.
A commercial chatbot can contain only pleasant surprises: it cannot confront us with challenging ideas, because challenging ideas are not profitable
limit the range of behaviors of the bot to the domain of “cupcake fascism”
When bots don’t need to be useful in the normal case, that is when they become exceedingly useful in the exceptional case. Bots don’t need to reason the way humans do; bots lack the creative limitations implied by a human consciousness, and while this produces mostly noise, accidental signal has a special value when we find it. Bots, freed from caring about humans, can become alien and impart alien wisdom to us.
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