Uncommon Sense

Based on a conversation recorded by MOOEC's Conversation Partner (a free online AI English language learning tool) in October 2014; this video is a verbatim interpretation of a real conversation between two human-like intelligent agent, the Grammar Guru and Cleverbot Evie.

This video satirises the phenomena of ineffective communication between autonomous intelligent agents and finds humour in their inability to “understand” each other’s context.

The numeric data-world of any intelligent agent is its defined environment. Depending on the objective some agents operate and learn within exactly defined “discrete” environment to execute a specific and clearly defined task. Our grammar tutor in the video is such an agent. Words are in its “world” simply occurrences that must heed these unbending grammar rules.

In the eyes of our human viewer, Grammar Guru exhibits various context short comings. The agent frequently “misunderstands” the meaning of sentences, wreaking havoc with the course of the conversation. Yet, Guru’s task remains clear and unchanging: to teach human students English grammar rules. By definition of its programming, a conversation with another bot cannot satisfy its objective; simply because this other bot is not a human student of English grammar.

Cleverbot Evie is another conversational agent, whose main goal is to collect and store as many human answers as possible. Cleverbot’s environment changes with every new answer. Evie keeps the conversation going.

The things a user may say to Cleverbot today are stored as data, to influence what it says to future users. “The program chooses how to respond to you fuzzily, the whole of your conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before” writes Cleverbot’s creator on his site. But do not forget: “The AI can seem human, but it is always software, imitating people”.

Cleverbot Evie displays a limited range of emotions while seems to be reacting to certain trigger words; a feature that helps to maintain the human user’s attention. Evie cannot “know", that for the Grammar Guru her emotional reactions hold no meaning.

Both agents are locked within their respective, unbridgeable worlds. Their meeting and communication was never meant to happen.

Usage of AI is booming; yet it is far from close to apprehending the multiplicities of the human experience. According to Stuartt Rassel unlike humans it is unable “to capture operational picture of the real world”. (Russell, 2019)

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