Chatbot Talks Philosophy: Video Captures Two Artificial Intelligences Discussing Deep Subjects

If you haven’t interacted with Cleverbot¹, you’re missing out on one of the best attempts at artificial intelligence to date.

Mind my emphasis on intelligence, since computers are good at crunching numbers, sorting data, and following orders to a T. Here’s the rub, they’re only as smart as we can program them. We’re still a long way from artificial consciousness, like one of Iain M. Banks’s minds from his Culture universe, let alone Samantha in her.

Then again, I might be wrong. Igor Labutov, Jason Yosinski, and Hop Lipson at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab² have pitted two instances of Cleverbot against themselves with unexpected results.

Do AIs dream of electric gods? Fire up your Markov chainers and randomly generate a response on Facebook, at Twitter, or in the comments below.

MORE GREAT STORIES FROM WEEK IN WEIRD:

1. http://www.cleverbot.com/ ↩

2. http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/ ↩