A.I. Inspiration: The Science Fiction That Frames Discussion

by Matthew Rosenberg & John Markoff, NYTimes.com

Some Like It Bot: Algorithms are getting better at entertaining us

by Laura Hudson, FiveThirtyEight

Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense

by Annalee Newitz, ars technica

This new Skype bot lets you chat with Spock

by Katherine Noyes, PC World

Get berated into reading by a Werner Herzog bot

by Dennis DeClaudio, A.V. Club

Meet The Sexy Robot Catfishing Dudes At SXSW

“Ex Machina,” which premiered in Austin during SXSW, tells the story of a young coder invited to his boss’ compound, where he meets Ava, an eerily human robot. Their interactions are part of a Turing Test, which holds that a truly artificially intelligent machine will convince a person of its humanity.

On Tinder, Ava asked questions that could have come from an artificial intelligence trying to understand humans. That’s what makes this Tinder stunt so creepy: Brock thought Ava was a real woman (even though, as The Verge noted in hindsight, her Tinder account “uses punctuation and capitalization like a middle school teacher with tenure.”) (Katie Sola, Huffington Post)

Warner Bros. Fights Piracy with an Army of Bots that Mimic Humans

Court filings reveal that Warner Bros. employs an army of “robots” not only to hunt down pirated content on the internet, but to mimic human behavior as they do it. Basically, these robots act like a movie-stealing internet user and search a list of 200 sites known to host pirated content. If they find a suspicious link—not necessarily a guilty link—they fire off a takedown notice. The most unsettling part of the process? There are no humans involved. Ever. (Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo)

Just don’t expect an in-depth response

Ricky Robinett, a developer at Twilio, has created a chatbot that responds to every text message it receives with the same three words: “I am Groot.” No matter what message you send to (866) 740-4531, you will get exactly the same response: “I am Groot.” (Graeme McMillan, The Hollywood Reporter)

Image: Marvel Entertainment

Do Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn’t Mean Much

But of course it’s one thing to be able to express emotions and another to really feel them. A lot of people maintain that that’s something computers simply can’t do. As a contemporary of Turing put it, no mechanism could feel grief when its valves fuse or be made miserable by its mistakes. That sounds right to me — how could a machine feel any of those emotions without a human body to touch them off? You can get it to signal sorrow by synthesizing a catch in its voice, but it’s not going to be caused by a real sob rising in its chest. (Geoff Nunberg, NPR)

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