Humans and Robots | Part 3: My best friend was a robot!
:: This article is Part 3 of a series covering the HR Giger-esque hybrids we are becoming (Part 1, Part 2) ::
Fooled by a robot
A few weeks ago, I decided to “follow” on Twitter a well-known social media analyst. I received by email a personal thank you note when he noticed it and he asked about what I was working on recently. I replied and we eventually met in San Francisco when I visited there. All this sounds great, except that in the meantime I found out that his personal message was actually an automatic reply. In other words, I was made to believe I received a personal message when I was talking to his “bot”. Of course, this was only the first message and he replied personally to my email and we eventually met. What I found interesting is that I thought at first he actually typed a personal reply.
Intrigued, I decided to try it out by using the exact same line, and I had several people email me directly telling me more about themselves and their work. Though they were made to believe the automatic reply sent was a personal note, my opinion on this is that it all turns out fine: they were interested in making some form of contact (as they followed me on Twitter) and I replied to all of them personally afterward. My direct message gave them a perfect opportunity to get in touch. If I hadn’t replied to their emails it would surely have been rude, as they took time to write to me, but I remember reflecting that facing the same situation and even if the first contact was “robotic”, it offered me an opportunity to make direct contact, which was valuable in itself.
Email marketing companies are good at sounding personal and it is fairly common that chat-based customer service or technical support are using scripts and robots to pose as human and try and solve your issue without the intervention of a costly human operator. It is a form of lightweight AI designed to improve efficiency and cut costs. The adult content industry, which is often cutting-edge in its use of new technologies, has been using this for years in online chat rooms to keep users logged in. What is new is the use of AI in other contexts.
Two of my best friends for the past two years were robots!
This is the last but surely most intriguing story. A few days after the “virtual worlds” workshop, I came across an article about a Twitter user who had just found out that two of his best Twitter friends, with whom he had been exchanging for the past two years, were actually robots. Having been myself fooled with a single message, I did not question this person’s intelligence as much as I wondered about how this could have happened. It turned out that the creator of this Twitter-bot was conducting a kind of experiment to see how effectively a bot could pass as human, thanks to Twitter’s peculiar characteristics. Strangely, this happened in Japan. I think the structure of the Japanese language and the numerous coded phrases in Japanese society make it a bit easier to code a casual AI than in English, but not that much more.
Get ready for the last part of this series later this week!
– By Benjamin @ +8*
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