A rapidly growing, benign, form of internet bot is the chatbot. From 2016, when Facebook Messenger allowed developers to place chatbots on their platform there has been an exponential growth of their use on that forum alone. 30,000 bots were created for Messenger in the first six months, rising to 100,000 by September 2017.[8] Avi Ben Ezra, CTO of SnatchBot, told Forbes that evidence from the use of their chatbot building platform pointed to a near future saving of millions of hours of human labour as 'live chat' on websites was replaced with bots.[9]
In 1950, Alan Turing's famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published,[7] which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. This criterion depends on the ability of a computer program to impersonate a human in a real-time written conversation with a human judge, sufficiently well that the judge is unable to distinguish reliably—on the basis of the conversational content alone—between the program and a real human. The notoriety of Turing's proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, published in 1966, which seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human. However Weizenbaum himself did not claim that ELIZA was genuinely intelligent, and the introduction to his paper presented it more as a debunking exercise:
Along with the continued development of our avatars, we are also investigating machine learning and deep learning techniques, and working on the creation of a short term memory for our bots. This will allow humans interacting with our AI to develop genuine human-like relationships with their bot; any personal information that is exchanged will be remembered by the bot and recalled in the correct context at the appropriate time. The bots will get to know their human companion, and utilise this knowledge to form warmer and more personal interactions.
