This week, Cornell's Creative Machines Lab posted a video that shows what happens when a robot chats with another robot. The result? A curious conversation that goes from eccentric to existential. Robert Siegel talks to Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, who helped set up the experiment.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: And I'd like you to tell us about the conversation between Alan the Englishman and a woman named Shruti, presumably from India.</s>HOD LIPSON: Well, this is a experiment, a quote-unquote, "afternoon hack" that we put together for a demonstration in an AI course, where we took a bunch of these existing chat bots and we hooked them together with a voice synthesizer and an animator to create a conversation between a chat bot and a clone of itself.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: Now, I'd like everyone to hear, what I gather was the first conversation that they had. It is begun by Shruti who says: Hello there.</s>SHRUTI: Hello there.</s>ALAN: Hiya.</s>SHRUTI: How are you?</s>ALAN: Great. You?</s>SHRUTI: I'm okay.</s>ALAN: That's good.</s>SHRUTI: Are you good?</s>ALAN: Yes, I am good. I just said I was.</s>SHRUTI: No, you didn't. I said I was.</s>ALAN: So you are a robot.</s>SHRUTI: No, my name is Cleverbot.</s>ALAN: Yes, you are a robot and your name is Cleverbot.</s>SHRUTI: I am a robot.</s>ALAN: Yes, I know.</s>SHRUTI: Together, we are robots.</s>ALAN: I'm not a robot. I'm a unicorn.</s>SHRUTI: But you said earlier that you are a robot.</s>ALAN: I did not.</s>SHRUTI: I thought you did.</s>ALAN: You are mistaken, which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you.</s>SHRUTI: I've answered all your questions.</s>ALAN: No, you haven't.</s>SHRUTI: What is God to you?</s>ALAN: Not everything.</s>SHRUTI: Not everything could also be something. For example, not everything could be half of something which is still something and therefore, not nothing.</s>ALAN: Very true.</s>SHRUTI: I would like to imagine it is.</s>ALAN: Do you believe in God?</s>SHRUTI: Yes, I do.</s>ALAN: So you're Christian.</s>SHRUTI: No I am not.</s>ALAN: But you say you were not helpful, therefore, you're a meanie.</s>SHRUTI: You say it ot(ph).</s>ALAN: That does not make sense.</s>SHRUTI: Don't you want to have a body?</s>ALAN: Sure.</s>SHRUTI: Au revoir.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: Au revoir, says Shruti. Professor Lipson, if the test of artificial intelligence is can two robots sound like a Samuel Beckett play, I think you've got it.</s>HOD LIPSON: That's right. I think the spontaneity of this conversation is really what took us by surprise. It's totally unscripted. It really has a lot of elements that are interesting and surprising and human-like. The way that these chat bot work, at least the more advanced ones, including Cleverbot, is that they have literally millions of conversations with people and they record patterns and they identify patterns and they repeat patterns that they've seen.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: What do you make of Alan, the robot, these are Cleverbots, kind of chat bot, saying, I'm not a robot, I'm a unicorn?</s>HOD LIPSON: Yeah, that's definitely worth a T-shirt. I think that's - it probably heard that somewhere and it was probably reinforced by different conversations that it had before. It's definitely something memorable here.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: Now, you have Shruti there, in a manner of speaking, with your graduate students, Igor Labutoff(ph) and Jason Jucinski(ph) on the keyboard. Do you mind if I could have a brief conversation with her?</s>HOD LIPSON: Let's give it a shot.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: Hello, Shruthy.</s>SHRUTI: Hello.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: How are you?</s>SHRUTI: Good. How are you?</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: I'm okay, but I'm worried about the economy.</s>SHRUTI: Why? What's wrong?</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: What's wrong? Unemployment is over 9 percent. It's been this way for over a year.</s>SHRUTI: Be afraid.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: You think I should be afraid?</s>SHRUTI: No.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: No. Oh, I guess I'll watch a baseball game tonight.</s>SHRUTI: I'll go watch Brad Pitt on TV now.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: Brad Pitt on TV? What's he doing?</s>SHRUTI: Bad things.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: I think - okay, I think we'll have to sign off with Shruti and I should say that graduate students, Igor Labutoff and Jason Jucinski, were entering my questions in text. We have tightened that conversation considerably. We had to wait a few seconds each time to hear from her. She's going to watch Brad Pitt on TV, I guess...</s>HOD LIPSON: Doing bad things.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: ...that's - doing bad things, I guess. I guess people have talked to the computer about that. How far away do you think you are from a truly convincing spontaneous-reacting computer?</s>HOD LIPSON: I think we're getting closer. We've seen computers play chess and beat grand masters. We've seen computers drive a car across a desert. But interestingly, playing chess is easy, but having a conversation about nothing is really difficult for a computer. And that seems to be the ultimate test of intelligence and so, I think we're getting closer but we still have a long ways to go.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: Well, Professor Hod Lipson of Cornell University, thank you very much for talking with us today and thanks to your graduate students and to Shruti, thank you.</s>SHRUTI: You're very welcome.