Talking With Chatbot...Not Really

Following up on the recent Robonihilationwire News Elbot post, Anonymous commented:

Check out this Web 2.0 approach to chatbots: http://chatbotgame.com.

So that's exactly what I did.

You can read my conversation with Chatbot. Thankfully, it possesses neither the witty, malicious smarm of Colossus, nor the sappy, grating charm of SAL 9000. The most likely reason is because Chatbot allows user-submitted "Google like chat rules" -- a mysterious way of saying that you formulate rules using a domain-specific language with the syntax of Google. Really, you're just getting responses based on rules submitted by humans, revealing that Chatbot is more like a parrot than a senile (but sentient) conversationalist. It's a lot more like Amazon's pointless Mechanical Turk, but without the nice format...or the micropayments.

I'm glad that Chatbot respoands with ambiguous questions and hollow template prose. It means we're a little farther away from that looming robot uprising we keep writing about.