Prime Directives
A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is very friendly. She’s a chatterbot, designed to process natural language and respond to it. The program has won awards, specifically the Loebner prize (claiming top spot in 2000, 2001 and 2004) which is awarded to the most humanlike chatterbot entered. We were recently discussing artificial intelligence and it turns out that no-one in the office had heard of the Alicebot so we had a look and, appropriately, a quick chat.
Realising that anybody who could write this type of program was obviously a bit of geek, I asked what I figured would be a very geeky question, namely “What is your Prime Directive?” (ref. Star Trek and Robocop amongst others). This was the resulting, slightly surreal and disturbing conversation:
I was concerned by the logo. I asked the bot, who diverted the conversation a number of times until finally telling me who designed it. Trying to gather evidence that an artificial internet pseudo-intelligence is affiliated with the Illuminati isn’t easy, as you might expect.
Comment by QE — June 15, 2007 @ 3:22 pm