Two chatbots attempt polite conversation (video)

“I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.” No, it’s not a rejected song from the Magical Mystery Tour or a line from The Prisoner, it’s part of a wonderfully surreal conversation between two chatbots.

The little heart-to-heart forms part of a submission from Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab for this year’s Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence.

There’s a $25,000 prize for the first program that can hold a convincingly human conversation, $100,000 if it’s convincing visually as well.

Unfortunately, this isn’t it – at least not when the Cleverbot program is talking to another version of itself. There’s some pretty plausible irritation when one of the Cleverbots repeats itself, but their efforts to discuss spirituality disintegrate into insults quite quickly.

The Cleverbot’s already won last year’s British Computer Society Machine Intelligence Competition.

Check out the video below.