This variety of bot talks with you on sites such as Tinder and Facebook. Programmers design chatbots to simulate real conversation long enough to convince you to buy something, click on a link or offer personal information. Readers — This report by Noah Pransky, my new Journalism Hero, is so well done and so shocking, I hope that it gets reposted throughout the blogosphere: (I have removed the video because it automatically starts playing anytime you go to my blog.) It details how men who go online to adult chat rooms and begin chats with people who say they are of legal age, then get entrapped as “sex offenders,” when the date bait “reveals” that she is actually underage. (I think that the date bait is, ironically, actually OF legal age, PRETENDING to be under age, “to catch a predator.”) The whole operation is so convoluted, creepy and calculated that it doesn’t seem to bear any relation to the stated intent of these stings, which is to protect the children who accidentally wander into these chat rooms and have no idea what they are stumbling into. In the Turing Test — conceived by British computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1950s — chatbots engage in typed conversations with humans, and try to fool them into thinking they're humans, too. (As a control, some users unknowingly chat with humans pretending to be chatbots.) At a recent Turing competition, Cleverbot fooled 59 percent of its human interlocutors into thinking it was itself a human.
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