Tired of arguing politics - send in the robot!

SoWal Expert

Nov 18, '10 · 4:54 PM1,276

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So he wrote a script to do it for him. Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds.

Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they're not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That's in part because the robot is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it.

The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won't be swayed by any amount of argumentation.

In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.

https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/?p1=A3

I would love to test that robot out on Sowal! :lol:

Replies

Beach Fanatic

Nov 19, '10 · 1:01 PM#27

I thought it was a great analogy - still can't believe people think pooping in the nachos is appropriate behavior and obviously you don't want people at your party who do such things. 😀

First of all, this thread has gotten completely out of hand and secondly, the people of my party have more common sense than to poop in the nachos. On the other hand, I doubt seriously if some of your party even know what nachos are, let alone of what they consist. (This is my last post on pooping in nachos).:wave: