Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Nanniebots are automated software agents that log onto chatrooms and pretend to be young children in order to catch pedophiles. "The nanniebots do such a good job of passing themselves off as young people that they have proved indistinguishable from them. In conversations with 2000 chatroom users no one has rumbled the bots..." The article also includes some sample transcripts from the bots as well as real children, so you can see how good your Turing test skills are. Update: Michael Williams, an artificial intelligence expert and a PhD student in CS at UCLA has doubts about the claims as to how realistic the Nanniebots are. He explains his reasoning here.