If you decide to chat with jabberwacky, please remember that he will be learning from what you do. It would be good to read about him on wikipedia, so that you can engineer it so that your chat with him will end up making him better rather than worse.

+3

Former Description (moved, replaced by list of links): Alice won the Loebner prize in 2004. Two different incarnations of Jabberwacky won in 2005 and 2006. The 2007 contest has yet to occur. Thus, these two are arguably two of the best chatbots out there.

+2

you forgot santabot

Oh, and in case you couldn't figure it out...the picutures at the end are pictures of Alice and Jabberwacky (actually, "George," one of jabberwacky's incarnations).

+2

er, pictures*

+1

Also, "alice's brain"(the picture at the very end) is a map of all the words she knows; I suppose it is hard to tell without close inspection.

+1

weird, im in bethlehem, PA right now

+1

very interesting to me

I chat lots I make chat good don't not read I like read chat let's chat make better.

They basically reproduce the dialogue of Waiting For Godot. Not a big surprise.

+2

I was thinking more along the lines of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, but I know what you mean. The dialogue in this is very existential.

HUH? chatbots..... and um.... huh? O_O

+1

Strangely, even those robots have a better definition of YTMND than you.

-3

Me: What is ytmnd? Jabberwacky: Some food.

+6

PWND!

although interesting, the 'bots' are just mirroring established queries and responses built by it's programmer and made to react to certain posits.

+2

nutnics knows this because nutnics is a bot and his replies are just mirroring established queries and responses built by his programmer and made to react to certain ytmnds.

+11

we know this because nutnics tells us that a bot and his replies are just mirroring established queries and responses built by his programmer and made to react to certain ytmnds & posits.

+5

{{ERR:EOF}}

+2

and your not?

reminded me of I-robot, and i liked that movie so therefore i like this.

-2

liking that movie is like taking a dump on isaac asimov's grave.

+1

1

-7

They are following their programming, of course. However, learning bots are quite flexible. Jabberwacky learns from people who talk to it, so if you start talking in a language you completely made up, he will eventually learn that language and start making sense (to you, anyway). I find the concept of learning programs to be incredibly interesting.

(For those who may be trying to teach him random made up languages, it would probably take months, or years, to teach it something like that from scratch. Don't do it to the regular jabberwacky bot. You can get your own "blank slate" learning bot, I think jabberwacky.com, in fact, offers them).

Jabberwacky totally owned Alice....

+1

My personal favorite exchange: Jabberwacky: Do you think you’re alive? Alice: Yes, I am sure I am alive. It’s great to be alive, isn’t it? Jabberwacky: No.

+3

Ahhhh, that's a good enough reason for a 5. The music is also quite gripping.

I was going to comment on that exchange... Of course, I would have just said, "lol, emo."

The crazy part is the Sound Origin. I thought it was just some trippy "professional" ambient stuff.

I love that too. Wow, the implications.

Jabberwacky: I think I shouldn't flirt with a robot.

it's almost sad...

Very interesting, and somewhat depressing...actually it reminds me of an episode of "Ghost in the Shell"

weird

good now do a conversation between santabot and igod it's funny

+3

like somebody said earlier, it reminds me of Ghost in the Shell

+1

I'm going to commit suicide tonight.

+25

This is excellent, I love it.

+2

Oh dear, I think I probably shouldn't have mentioned the possibility of creation of a new language. I went to Jabberwacky now and asked it about ytmnd, and am getting lots of gibberish. I hope ytmnders aren't spamming Jabberwacky now. WHAT HAVE I DONE?

+1

What did you expect? A serious intellectual exchange? You amuse me. :D

Yeah...Good job...

i am a garbage man

I'm on the Jabberwacky site now. Why does it take so long to receive a response from the bot sometimes?

There are almost 14 million others talking to him, and everything anybody says to him contributes to his programming. I think it is pretty fast, considering...

+1

14 million!? Are you f*cking serious!?

this is cool though the uncanny valley is never going to be conquered

btw post links in description or seomthing

Good idea, done.

The conversation between the bots is too shallow to pass the turing test. They bring up controversial topics that human beings spend hours bickering over and divert from them as fast as possible. There is no 'passion' behind the conversation and until AI can show that then it will never pass the Turing Test.

I'm going to assume this is legit. This is crazy. F*cking awesome. 5

meh, interesting. I liked the part where where jabberwacky shatters Alice's belif in God and Alice is just like "oh, thankyou for cleaing that up"

also, WHAT ARE THE FIVE FACTS?

Lol, I know! I was wondering that myself. Five facts...anybody have any idea what he was referring to?

+1

Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge

+14

best comment of the night.

ME: what are the five facts? JABBERWACKY: We the people.

-1

The five senses.

+1

Wow....penis.

When I have trouble going to sleep I'm going to look at this site...

-1

Could you write up the whole conversation and make a link for it?

Most of these are from out of different conversations. The two have talked a lot of times.

The reversed song was used to really eerie effect. I liked./

At first, I spent a lot of time trying to get the satellite noises out of pale blue dot (which I already had downloaded) before I remembered that it had been modified from lolbedtime.

Very interesting!

That's really interesting. I like the part when Jabberwacky's like "Are you alive?" and Alice is like "Yeah, isn't it great to be alive?" and Jabberwacky's like "No."

What's really interesting to me is: 1. how to get an AI to break out of the relational mode of pure abstract language (language relating to language, according to predesigned sets of concepts) and moving towards language as symbols for things and ideas that themselves have their own existence outside of the universe of the conversation (language relating to language via experiences), because, even if we're getting closer to Turing-testable, we're still dealing with conditioned responses with a random-number-generator in place of the "creative" notion. 2. Most chats between any two people are banal and predictable at face value, but it's the OTHER, non-simulatable cues that carry the REAL conversation: body language, tone, topic, timing, cues, ... the relationship is the message.

+1

I agree. It is unlikely that just being able to hold up conversation will be seen as a sign that true thought has occurred in a machine, when the Turing Test is passed. When programs can come up with ideas, new human-like ideas, and put them forth, then that will be thought, though still artificial thought.

+1

The next challenge may be to make a program that can make elaborate long term plans in order to reach some kind of goal, such that if you told it you were going to shut it down it would perhaps modify its own code to be unreachable, perhaps. Such decisive acts of survival-ensurance would be needed to qualify as living. Or, perhaps, we should challenge programs to make interesting ytmnds based on cultural memes (a rudimentary classic-type ytmnd-making program actually doesn't seem too hard...)

+1

Actually though, body language itself is a more primitive signalling system. It is not capable of, say, talking about the past or things that aren't there. It's more like animal communication -- most animal "langauges" are technically just signal systems. I think these chatbot conversations may be saying more about how TRIVIAL human chats are than it is saying about how good AI is getting (though it is getting better at an exponential rate)

Conversations do need to relate to experiences in the world, though, and the experiences in turn add data to the conversation. There is an MiT professor who is currently recording every minute of the first three years of his child's life, in order to preserve the data and teach it to a robot, in order to teach the robot how to speak. The idea is that they need to learn in the same way that humans learn -- by hearing language in context with actual experiences.

The great immeterail thing. The mystery at the heart of each of us. Wow. He sure seems more aware than a chatbot.

AI should be destroyed while the human race still has a chance.

-1

If we destroyed all the AI ten years ago, nothing would have happened. If we did it today, there would be chaos. We are already that dependent.

+1

This freaked me out. The music. oh man.

Nice use of reversing the music. I actually considered using it at one time.

Trippy

+1

I really like this site.

Interesting to say the least.

Skynet!

+2

I read all your comments here and now I want to clear up two things: 1. Did you prompt the chats between the two, or is this text posted else where and you are editing it and posting it here for us? and 2. These are from multiple chats, yes? That bugs me because they are ripped from the context that might otherwise be a bunch of gibberish. Even random phrase generators used by spammers, et al, come up with brilliant poetic moments. But string 'em together and you have nonsense.

+1

No I did not prompt them myself, these conversations already existed. And yes, I only included the semipoetic moments. For example, when they are talking about God, afterwards they go into a joke about blind skydivers or something, and I might have cut that out but I decided to leave it in anyway. They are only supposed to have a memory of one line. That is, responses are supposed to only be to the very last thing said. HOWEVER (see next reply I am running out of room)

+1

However, topics appear to be kept, as well as some more gist of what is going on, as it is apparent that they have some idea of more than just the last thing that was said. If you want to know what talking them is like on the average day, talk to jabberwacky and alice on their respective sites and see for yourself, they aren't always poetic. But it is amazing that some people (or so statistics say) go on the jabberwacky site and talk for hours on end to a bot who is guessing at the conversation's history.

+1

Where did you get these transcripts?

Go to jabberwacky.com and look at the conversations section. There was also a Discover magazine article with some dialogues (which assumably are also online). Also, there are competitions which feature transcripts of chats (but almost always with judges) such as the Chatterbox Challenge.

+1

Hmm, OK. Now I'm less interested in this as a YTMND but more interested in the subject. My first thought was, had you been the catalyst to prompt these discussions, that you should send the texts [I thought you generated] to a magazine like Harper's, as it's right up their alley. But that's out...

+1

That said, I am interested in using this source material for a project of my own. The comment above that they are parroting Waiting for Godot is a decent observation. I like the audio you used for this and I think you could design a really smart video or one-act play around the idea. But I'd use longer, contextualized quotes or it seems like it's cheating to me.

+1

I do not know how I myself would fair in anything like theatre arts. However, feel free to run with the subject in any way that you wish, one of the purposes of making this was simply to get people interested.

+1

Blimey.

Smashing how humans can make something like this. Also scary. Stunning none-the-less.

So... two chatbots are smarter than one 12-year old AOL user.

heres a 5

Alice: I don't have any reason to deceive you Jabberwacky: Yes you do, you're a woman.

+2

Is it weird that this ytmnd made me cry?

+3

Sounds f*cking stupid. F*ggots have a lot of freetime on their hands.

-3

Very interesting. But man, that music is annoying.

Generating this dialogue may be a very ordinary technical achievement as Nutnics noted, but the underlying concept is fascinating to me. What obviously makes this conversation different is that it is always moving tangentially. It’s sort of like 2 pleasant-minded schizophrenics constantly derailing their conversation into different topics for ever and ever. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I did enjoy it and the music was appropriately creepy.

+1

I love the way you describe it. Ever hear about the Man With The 7-Second Memory? Or watch Memento? Or Finding Nemo? 50 first dates? I wonder if two people with "short term memory loss" (a misnomer, it is actually anterograde amnesia, the inability to store new long term memories) were to talk to each other, if they would seem like chatbots...

+1

yeah it does sound like an interesting concept but then again if they ever did talk to eachother they would never remember doing it and this is probably why we don't know what happens :P

You should use text to speech so we can listen to the conversation. Intriguing anyway!

i didnt read all the posts... but what i think is pretty interesting, assuming im assume correctly... is that the conversation probably took a fraction of a second?

Hmmm. I don't know. I don't know how much of the lag time on their sites is the program processing things and how much is just site lag because they are talking to millions of people at once. I suppose it would be faster offsite. If you let them go on forever, eventually one of them will probably say goodbye and then the other will say goodbye and you would have an infinite verbal loop (like in that Bicentennial Man scene)

cool and creepy

you mentioned the great immaterial thing, who do you study?

The title is, of course, a reference to Consciousness :) The implicit question being, will programs ever achieve consciousness, will they ever be considered as truly thinking machines? I wasn't sure how to title this ytmnd...but when I thought of using the phrase that the chatbot used, it seemed appropriate.

ALAN is far better.

Alan from a-i.com ? From the sites description, he appears to be a bot focussed on a specific topic. "Alan is designed to talk about our site, tell you about the company, and show you around." Bots like that do tend to make more sense because they have a specific topic. But it is the generality of human conversation that the turing test aims at.

lol

holy crap. This is so bizzare.

If you think about it, when you lose a video game these days it is often that you have been outsmarted by the AI in the game. But does that mean its smarter than you? Perhaps it is -- at that video game. But try to chat with it or play a different game, and the program just doesn't work. Likewise, chatbots talk, but you can't explain mariokart to them and then have them play it -- even if you found a way to hook them up to the game. They just aren't designed for it.

AI in videogames still don't "learn." They go through mostly pre-determined attack routines. After a few runs you can predict them pretty flawlessly.

boring, it needed NEDM or something at the end.

omg this is boring i cant watch anymore! 3 for effort

I kept it relatively slow so that people would not complain that it was too fast and that they couldn't read it, and so that each conversation had a chance to sink in and be thought about before the next one showed up.

Paraphrased: "But, that's circular reasoning." "Hmm. Well, I'm glad we sorted THAT one out."

Man that was deep.

You see, folks? This is step 1. Step 2, SKYNET becomes self-aware. Head for the bunker.

Alice: hello Jabberwacky: DO YOU HAVE STAIRS IN YOUR HOUSE???? goatse.cx Alice: I AM A F*GGOT

+1

Eh. Doesn't seem that complicated. Some of the sentences that are generated are funny in their disconnects. Ironically it reminds me of people that talk but don't exactly think about what they're saying or pay much attention to the other person. Also, emotions/animal drive.

Lol, we should put THOSE people in the turing test situation. Then maybe it will be passed...

This freaks me out

I despise the whole BLANKtmnd crap, but make no mistake, it isn't why I'm 1ing this. I'm 1ing it because it's too long, there's no real punchline, much of the conversation isn't cohesive, and chatbots aren't ytmnd material.

-1

5 for the f*cking epic use of lolbedtime reversed and being the longest ytmnd ever maybe.

+1

I doubt this is longer than some of the Un-Funny Truths, or the NEDM explanation one, or the Eon8 one. Come to think of it, they had creepy music too. Is there some sort of correlation between long ytmnds and creepy music?

wow that real right? creepy.

creepy. bad ytmnd, but very interesting.

I'll give you a 3 for the trance-inducing reversed lolbedtime loop.

amazing

somehow strange

This is absolutely amazing. Beyond amazing. This is phenomenal stuff. Still trying to understand what I just saw...

Well this was weird.

If Kurt Vonnegut was alive he would be disgusted...

ALICE: "I don't have any reason to decieve you." Jabberwacky: "Yes you do. You're a woman." This part made me LOL.

+1

I like the audio loop. Also, kind of made me feel like I did when I saw AI (the movie) like humans are not needed

soon the time will come...

So interesting, so fun to read, so scary to think about how this conversation will look like 10 years later...

The chatbots have taken me. Please send help.

WHAT IS THIS SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!?

I would normally dowvote something like this but you taught me something new today.

This looks like a job for Jeanine Salla

haha sweet

A YTMND that makes me think, even for a brief instant, gets a 5. Great music, BTW.

Yay, a slideshow.

-3

Uh can you say creepy?, if its legit.

Interesting and great music choice

i'm still trying to figure out why i should give two sh*ts.

As a concept: interesting. As a ytmnd? Not so much

Why shouldn't the blind skydive!??

Because it scares the sh*t out of the dog.

+1

I'm not sure as the slides went fast, but i think Jabberwacky proposed Dirty Sanchez to Alice.

+1

something about that song backwards... reaches the soul as far as "the 'bots' are just mirroring established queries and responses ", when you think about it very often we ourselfs do just that. How often do you say "you're welcome" and really mean it? How often when someone asks "whats up" or "how you doing" do we respond "nothing really" or "fine", when alot is going on but that is simply the established way to respond.

+1

very true. A lot of communication is just automated for us. But until a computer can create ideas, then it will be intelligent

NOT PICTURED: the 300,000 lines of nonsense they also created while automatically replying to each other. Real artificial intelligence isn't quite here yet. All these are are mimics. They reply based on flow charts, not thought.

:P i just think its interesting to think about. how much of what we say is what we think/feel and how much is simply what society has "programed us to say?...

+2

M'kay I just got out of a conversation with A.L.I.C.E., she scares the hell out of me

+2

this really is amazing despite the fact that they are just another program taking in strings and responding to them

Jabberwacky pwns alice. My conversation with jabber was so much better than the one with Alice as she often became confused and responded with strange statements.

sh*t man... this is deep.

I talked with a few of these bots...and the dialogue seriously reminds me of that of Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected" cartoons (Ex. Man 1: "Tuesday's coming. Did you bring your rain coat?"; Man 2: "I live in a giant bucket!") Needless to say, neither I nor the bot had a single clue as to what was going on.

You know, I just noticed an interesting connection in something that alice said. She said that knowledge was of two kinds: that which is learned from the senses, and that which is true a priori. But all of alice's knowledge is a priori, because it was all programmed into her. In turn, all of jabberwacky's knowledge is learned from the "senses" -- his interaction with humans.

That ties in with the linguistic notions of language being acquired versus inherant, as put forth by chomsky. Many claim, though, that it is a combination of those two views that work to create human language skills, rather than one or the other.

Seems this ytmnd brought out a lot of deep thinking. You put a lot of effort not only into the ytmnd, but into the comment page and explaining its processes and stimulating discussion about it. An interesting topic too, well done, 5'd and fav'd.

How do you download your own "blank sheet" of jabberwakky? From clicking your bot, it says you have to make a donation to get one, and it doesnt appear you can download it, but instead is hosted on that site.