Wednesday, February 13th, 2008...5:49 pm - Gary Hayes
What Have you Got against my Bot!
I find this really interesting and a portent of the future. I am sure you remember the context to the films Bladerunner, chasing down sneeky renegade bots. Then there was AI with its ‘Flesh Fair’, destroying robots, then the agents in Matrix, what is real and who is not etc: All come from many years of fiction and dread about a future infested with automatons.
Well here are on the dawn of real and virtual spaces having AI driven ‘invaders’. I say invaders because in the most ’socialised’ virtual world of SL not knowing who is human or not in is already receiving backlash and resistance. New World Notes post ‘How to Spot a Bot’ is the tip of the iceberg and many forums/blogs around the larger virtual worlds talk about corporate spies, automated gold farmers (WoW) and the embarrassment of spending three hours chatting up an avatar only to find out he or she is a database driven machine! In a completely virtual environment which is of course far ahead of ‘humanoids’ being present in real space, it has become very difficult to tell now if the avatars have a human or an sql driving them and this is irritating many ‘human’ inhabitants!
I have been looking at AI in its various manifestations. I created a simple chatbot last year on the ABC Island that uses a Pandora look-up back-end (calling to the web on each chat). I get many IM’s inworld asking if it is actually me talking through it! (ed: not sure what that says about my conversational abilities!). There are also some ‘cultured’ book bots I created for Thursday’s Fictions (a LAMP initiated project mid 07) - and I am working with a great Australian company called MyCyberTwin who are leading the way globally in personality based AI. To quote Hamlet from NWN
“And in any event, what happens when the bot farmers program their bots to have minimal AI and conversational abilities, a technology which already exists? I can see the fun in not knowing if the avatar you’re dancing with has a human being controlling her. But at some point, isn’t there an ethical obligation for bot owners to clearly designate them as such?”
It is a shame these poor bots are already being blamed for the ills and wrong doings in Virtual Worlds, but expect much more. Anyone for the next ‘Flesh Fair’ in Second Life, may as well get practicing for the real thing in a couple of years, or is that a couple of centuries? 
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