Some of you, like me, are probably emacs users. And some of you may have, at some point, played with some of the sillier elisp extensions, such as M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead. For those who don’t know, it pits Eliza, one of the first ‘chatbots’ in the guise of an analyst against the Zippy the Pinhead quote generator. Wackiness ensues. I could not help but think of that while watching this video.
Researchers from Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab pitted two chatbots against each other in a talk-off, which rapidly degraded into a verbal sparring match. Though it did generate some great non sequiturs. I predict this is already being printed on T-shirts right now: “I’m not a robot. I’m a unicorn.”
Of course, the other thing it reminds me of is any number of comment threads and web discussions I’ve read over the years. On this flamewar made more sense than many of those.
Via Engadget.
(Try M-x spook sometime too, if you’re install has it.)
