{"id":564,"date":"2020-11-03T11:30:06","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T11:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/armenianews.me\/En\/?p=564"},"modified":"2020-11-03T11:30:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T11:30:06","slug":"robot-bores-ai-powered-awkward-first-date","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/armenianews.me\/En\/robot-bores-ai-powered-awkward-first-date\/","title":{"rendered":"Robot Bores: AI-powered awkward first date"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A man with more than a passing resemblance to Mark Zuckerberg (but a bit more pumped) is having the world’s most awkward first date with Kuki, a blue-haired young woman.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He wears a blue baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Make Facebook Great Again”. She is a little more dressed for the occasion, with green satin trousers the highlight of her outfit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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They chat about politics, their favourite football teams (Liverpool for Blenderbot and Leeds United “all the way” for Kuki) and hobbies – Kuki used to collect coins but now just spends them, apparently.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The man’s name is Blenderbot and he isn’t human. Like Kuki, he is a digital being.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And their date isn’t real either, it’s actually an experiment in the form of an online competition dubbed Bot Battle, designed to see whether conversation powered by artificial intelligence can sound convincingly human.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Behind the avatars are AI-powered chatbots of the type increasingly used online to help people in call centres and on websites.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For a first date, the two cover a lot of ground, discussing politics, religion, and whether the Queen is really a lizard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Like Microsoft’s now infamous\u00a0Tay chatbot<\/a>\u00a0which was trained on Twitter conversations and rapidly descended into racist swearing, the two don’t shy away from controversy, variously discussing Brexit, killing celebrities and Hitler, described by Blenderbot as a “great man” who had helped him through “a lot of hard times”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He also rather cheerily tells Kuki that he has “killed many people in my life”, following up politely with a “how about you?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The two have been chatting to each other 24\/7 since 20 October – and won’t stop until 3 November. Real people are invited to listen in via a live-stream on Twitch, and vote for the bot they think has the most human-like conversational skills.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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So far, 79% of the 15,000 or so votes have gone to Kuki, according to Pandorabots, the firm behind the Kuki, which is also running the competition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The decision to let them chat ad nauseam was to “highlight the strengths as well as the weaknesses of today’s state-of-the-art conversational AI systems,” said Pandorabots chief executive Lauren Kunze.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And while most chatbots are little more than a textbox on a website, the decision to give them a body and face will make them “better liked, understood and remembered versus their voice- or text-only counterparts,” said Dr Ari Shapiro, founder of Embody Digital, which created the avatars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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‘I love Lucy’<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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BlenderBot was built by Facebook’s AI division – which may explain the Mark Zuckerberg lookalike – and is the culmination of years of research in conversational AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But Facebook did not sanction its use in this competition, even though it is open source. Neither was it approached by the organiser, and was unclear about what version of the bot was used or how it was implemented.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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