thought encouraging some socio-cultural-based responses
might be interesting, e.g., is ‘dude’ a term only known in
the US or are AIs trained elsewhere (e.g., Urban Dictionary)
also hip to this lingo?”
“The world’s first robot psychologist would
probably be the toughest person to fool” —
Michael Mauldin, inventor of the Lycos search
engine and the Julia Chatterbot
The second part of my learning curve was adapting to
the screen’s layout. I was reading one conversation on the
upper left, responding via type in the lower left screen one
character at a time, reading the second conversation in the
top right, and responding again in the bottom right of the
screen — all while mentally processing two separate
conversations plus my responses simultaneously. Luckily,
being a loquacious female from Boston where people talk
fast and often, this visual multitasking feast became a 25
minute adrenaline rush for me. Most of the time, it seemed
obvious which was human and which one was the bot, but
I was determined to chat, test, and teach the AI bot as
much as I could before the 25 minutes were up.
Then, there was the challenge of ignoring noise — in
volume, not electronic. As I typed away with my multiple
conversations, I was also filtering input in the background
from Judge and Tech Correspondent, Tom Cheshire of Sky
News, who was taking live questions from viewers on the
Web and asking/typing them to the bots.
Loebner, who enjoyed the press and recognized the
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