Talking to Eliza in Private

As a player in AI since nearly its beginning, I knew the story of Eliza, and quoted its value and its cautions many times.   In talks, development and training.   In the chatbots we built to join our brand equity.   Today in IEEE Spectrum, a very good piece on Eliza. everyone should know at least this much of the story of this early chatbot.  Especially how it taught us unexpected things about interactions between humans and robots.  (below an intro, complete article at link)

Why People Demanded Privacy to Confide in the World’s First Chatbot
In 1966, the Eliza program couldn’t say much—but it was enough
By Oscar Schwartz

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum with his chatbot Eliza, running on a 36-bit IBM 7094 mainframe computer. .... 

Between 1964 and 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a German American computer scientist at MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, developed the first-ever chatbot [PDF].

While there were already some rudimentary digital language generators in existence—programs that could spit out somewhat coherent lines of text—Weizenbaum’s program was the first designed explicitly for interactions with humans. The user could type in some statement or set of statements in their normal language, press enter, and receive a response from the machine. As Weizenbaum explained, his program made “certain kinds of natural-language conversation between man and computer possible.”

He named the program Eliza after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class hero of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion who learns how to talk with an upper-class accent. The new Eliza was written for the 36-bit IBM 7094, an early transistorized mainframe computer, in a programming language that Weizenbaum developed called MAD-SLIP.    .... " 

AliceBot Chatbot Engine

I am reminded of the Alice Bot which we experimented with in the 90s.   Now the idea has taken hold as a simpler way of delivering AI, especially for human natural language interaction.

About Alicebot:

A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is an award-winning free natural language artificial intelligence chat robot. The software used to create A.L.I.C.E. is available as free ("open source") Alicebot and AIML software.

Try talking to A.L.I.C.E. just like a real person, but remember you are really chatting with a machine! A.L.I.C.E.'s Alicebot engine utilizes AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to form responses to yourquestions and inputs.

Unlike other commercial chat robot software costing thousands of dollars, the Alicebot engine and AIML are freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (used by GNU/Linux and thousands of other software projects). The A.L.I.C.E. project includes hundreds of contributors from around the world.

You can read more about the history of A.L.I.C.E., or find out how you can participate in the A.L.I.C.E. development community. ... " 

More on the relationship to early AI.   And the Alicebot AI Foundation.  Relationship to the work of Joseph Weizenbaum.

Via Jim Spohrer.

The Rise of Social Bots

In the July issue of the Communications of the ACM.  The cover article is "The Rise of Social Bots"

Good background, future, value and cautions.  Not very technical.  I like adding the adding of 'social' to the description, ultimately they must be able to work with us.  Very memorable points as it matched with our own experience in this area.

The Rise of Social Bots
By Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini  .... 

Bots (short for software robots) have been around since the early days of computers. One compelling example of bots is chatbots, algorithms designed to hold a conversation with a human, as envisioned by Alan Turing in the 1950s.33 The dream of designing a computer algorithm that passes the Turing test has driven artificial intelligence research for decades, as witnessed by initiatives like the Loebner Prize, awarding progress in natural language processing.a Many things have changed since the early days of AI, when bots like Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA,39 mimicking a Rogerian psychotherapist, were developed as demonstrations or for delight. 

Today, social media ecosystems populated by hundreds of millions of individuals present real incentives—including economic and political ones—to design algorithms that exhibit human-like behavior. Such ecosystems also raise the bar of the challenge, as they introduce new dimensions to emulate in addition to content, including the social network, temporal activity, diffusion patterns, and sentiment expression. A social bot is a computer algorithm that automatically produces content and interacts with humans on social media, trying to emulate and possibly alter their behavior. Social bots have inhabited social media platforms for the past few years.  .... " 

Enterprise Ready Virtual Worlds

The buzz in the virtual worlds space is that Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, are joining efforts with IBM to create enterprise safe virtual worlds. Such worlds, which could exist entirely behind corporate firewalls, might be able to provide strongly contextual spaces that could improve aspects of training, innovation, collaboration and remote interactions among teams of employees, or among employees and their clients. Might it be the only way to run and apply the knowledge of a large multinational in the future?

While IBM has made big investments in creating SL spaces that mimic real world enterprise spaces, I still don't see them as replacing the strength and warmth of human interaction. I have spent some time in SL, and the gaming aspect of virtual spaces and social interaction can me presented, but I don't see immediate enterprise value. Those that are thinking of doing this should read Joseph Weizenbaum's 'Computer Power and Human Reason', just commented on, which makes the point that fooling participants with interaction in a virtual world is not necessarily positive. I had a few interactions with IBM employees in SL that seemed like real knowledge exchanges, but we soon were so weighed down by the burden of the world itself, we decided that even an email exchange was more efficient.

I am not saying this is not a useful research effort, only that while our computing and visual capabilities have improved considerably, they still don't provide the required capabilities to aid the enterprise. It does remind me of the AI effort of the 80s. Lots of perceived benefits, things that we can apparently do well, but are still years away from doing well enough to pay for the net effort. Is it only about being able to create really good visualization? Or is there much more to it? Good luck to Linden and IBM.

Computer Power and Human Reason

Nicholas Carr overviews Joseph Weizenbaum's work. His 1976 book 'Computer Power and Human Reason' inspired and cautioned many of us. I recall reading it again during the heady artificial intelligence days of the late 80s. Made me think that delivering intelligence was harder than some of the proponents of AI were leading us to believe. His article points to a NYT obituary I had not seen.