ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE Failures would bring AI-powered chatbots closer to humans

As companies pin their hopes on chatbot and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the big question the world is facing today is whether these neural machines would turn out to be friends or foes of the human race. While AI-powered chatbots are doing superbly when it comes to data analytics, facial recognition, voice recognition and cognitive comprehension, the next big frontier is to prepare them for "real-life" conversions with people. Microsoft's AI chatbot "Tay" ran into trouble last year when Twitterati began slamming the "innocent" bot with racist and offensive comments. Launched as an experiment to engage people through "casual and playful conversation", Tay was soon taken off Twitter. "Bob" and "Alice" -- two bots created by Facebook -- were switched off last month when the team at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) found that the duo defied human-generated algorithms and started communicating in their own language.

According to the Facebook team, while the idea of AI agents inventing their own language may sound alarming for people outside the field, it is a well-established sub-field of AI. According to experts, where AI comes into the picture is when it can build its own algorithms by analysing patterns in large volumes of data, as long as there are good learning sets.Combine that with the power of automation ('bot'ification) and the knowledge available on the Internet, and we can harness enormous capabilities ." However,' general intelligence' is still a far-reaching goal for AI. -IANS