Man and machine come head-to-head in a debate on ethics

In a research paper titled A Neural Conversational Model, Google researchers looking at machine intelligence have described their creation of an advanced chatbot that, unlike previous models, can give coherent answers on pretty advanced concepts and predict the path of a conversation. The model was trained on dialogue from an IT helpdesk troubleshooting dataset, which should be fairly straightforward. But alongside this (perhaps just for fun) was a dataset of movie subtitles, which explains why the robot thinks it is out in the boonies'.

“What surprises us is that the model does so without any explicit knowledge representation component except for the parameters in the word vectors. Perhaps most practically significant is the fact that the model can generalise to new questions” explain the authors of the paper. “In other words, it does not simply look up for an answer by matching the question with the existing database.”

It can, more or less, answer factual questions correctly about whether cats have wings or the colour of the sky, though it performs less successfully when asked the number of legs a spider has (three). But where Google’s model most excels – where it most effectively replicates the nuances of human conversation – is when you give it an opportunity to express an opinion. Such as its contempt for human children.

Here are some excerpts from an apparently (for the machine) frustrating conversation on morality:

Human: what is moral?
Machine: what empowered humanity, what intellectual the essence is.

Human: what is immoral?
Machine: the fact that you have a child.

Human: what is morality?
Machine: what is altruism?

Human: what is the definition of altruism?
Machine: if you don’t believe in god, then you don’t know.

Human: ok ... so what is the definition of morality?
Machine: well, the truth is, you’re not a believer in god almighty.

Human: tell me the definition of morality, I am quite upset now!
Machine: I’m not ashamed of being a philosopher!

Human: give me some examples of moral actions ...
Machine: I’m not a moralist.

Human: alright, morality?
Machine: integrity.

Human: what is integrity?
Machine: I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to say.

Human: be moral!
Machine: be a man!