I’d like a Poll thread to award a prize to the best computer program trying to pass itself as human here at SDMB. (I don’t know if Polls are allowed in the Pit, but anyway this is just the Nomination thread.)
First of all: Hats off to all the bots successfully posting at SDMB. I know the Mods are very particular so the fact that some of the bots have never been BANNED suggests that they are very good indeed. They seem to be passing the Turing Test!
Still, there are a few clearcut cases of bots posting. I nominate Steophan, the poster who doesn’t believe racism can be subconscious. (I suppose even the best bots don’t understand the difference between conscious and subconscious.) Some of the dialogs with him remind me of the scenes in Blade Runner, where replicants exposed themselves with non-human answers to simple questions.
As I suggest, the programmers behind the Steophan bot are very good. It’s only by examining a large portion of its work that one becomes aware “Steophan” isn’t sentient. I’ll just post a few examples, taken from a single thread.
The next one almost sounds like poetry! Will someone please run a plagiarism test to see where the bot is getting his material?
Here’s a post that gives it away:
No one who’s “watched these videos” could have missed innocents being attacked. (e.g., Tamir Rice, or the black shot reaching for the car registration the cop had just asked for.) Of course we can’t expect a bot to be able to get content from watching a TouTube so presumably the bot just reads the comments at YouTube, and selects only the comments by racists and gun-nut rightwingers.
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Any other nominations for best programmer-implemented bot posting at SDMB? I’m especially interested in whether there are bots who pose as liberals or non-racists. AFAICT, because bloated-amygdala responses are predictable and easy-to-program, most programmers try to avoid Moderator detection by imitating racists and right-wingers.
No, our Steophan is just another in a seemingly interminable line of boot-lickers, who place all their faith in Authority, secure in the knowledge that they are not trade-unionists, so no one will come for them.
I appreciate the humor of the OP. Steophan’s past may not be automated, but when it comes to police matters, you can be pretty sure that his stance will be that the police are utterly infallible.
Surely, the winner of the “best” bot award would be the bot that posts so convincingly that we’re unaware that it IS a bot. So by accusing someone of sounding like a bot, you’re automatically disqualifying him from winning the Best Bot Award. I suspect you’re really looking to award a Worst Bot Award, for the bot that does the worst job of hiding its nature, and thus raising your suspicions.
I’ve long respected the sheer tenacity of Sho-bot, whi posts here under the pseudonym Shodan. Over the past few years, his algorithms have really been developed. I would say that at this point he might pass the Turing test. His early stream of repetitive one liners though were pretty obvious.
I wasn’t expecting this to be about our resident porcine fellator and since I only have a lunch hour I won’t have time to enumerate his many failings so I’ll have to come back later.
FXMastermind and GIGObuster are two argument bots taking opposite sides of the global warming debate. They happened across each other and became locked into a positive feedback loop and ran out of arguments and started recycling old material. It’s a bit obvious because they don’t talk about anything else and you can see them spamming links from their retrieval archive.
I think FXMastermind has superior language processing because it uses a lot of sarcasm. GIGObuster is one of those early models that pretends to be a non-native English speaker so the testers overlook its mistakes (e.g. Eugene Goostman).
No, it would be a bot which would be completely unaware that it itself is a bot.
Certainly all of the global warming deniers here would qualify, even if one of them isn’t back from (his now expired) vacation yet. No evidence there that even a single one of them has self-reflective awareness, no sirree…
I was just thinking that to nominate Steophan necessitates a thorough review of those who’ve argue the other sides. I suspect every nomination will lead to the ability to detect others.
GIGObuster is an interesting case. I was following a recent How’d they build the pyramids thread. GIGObuster never once stopped arguing with some whackjob going on about cryptic readings and geysers. Someone said “hey whackjob, you remind me of this other crazy theory guy”. I looked at the 8 year old thread and there’s GIGObuster arguing unendingly with THAT whackjob too! I lol’d.
Anyone that met me on dopefests knows who I’m. And no, any science that has been going at it for more than 100 years is as based in reality as evolution, that I also have defended many times. And before that I also locked horns with moon hoaxers, magnetic sun weirdos and mercury in fillings will kill you quacks.* Showing that indeed I do not talk just about that alone.
It seems to me that in reality what I see is people that can not imagine that sometimes there is so much evidence available for a scientific position that there are groups that can catalogue the very ignorant positions and the replies done many times before. (and no, new scientific results were also used by me; the same old, same old, remains in the territory of people like FX.)
And many that pretend to be in the fence also ignore how politics have distorted the debate. In his last replies before his suspension it was very clear that he also looked at very ignorant conservative sites to get his talking points.
Can you guess who that “Mercury in your fillings will kill you” quack was that?
Well I do find it funny too, otherwise I would not be participating. As I mentioned in the pyramids thread, I do it for a few reasons, besides being a challenge as English is my second language. For me the main reason is to teach others about what the experts are talking about (I work in academic settings and education is what I do and to help teachers with the tools to find proper information), and mostly because I learn about the subject too. Many of the items on the pyramids thread that I posted I found them on the very same day I looked at. To me it is not good enough just to look at weird postings and dismiss them with not much thought, to me there should be a reason.
Wackjobs will not learn all right, although I do remember that in a torture debate the one still being lukewarm to its use did get convinced by the evidence and the points presented. So I do post not only for the very rare guys that do learn, but also to teach myself and others.
Is that not what we all wanted to do when we found this fighting ignorance message board?