The people at the Cornell Creative Machines lab might spend their days doing serious research, but that doesn't mean they can't have a little fun along the way.
Cleverbot, an artificial intelligence program, was designed by Rollo Carpenter to emulate and engage in conversation with humans. The designers hope that the Cleverbot can so successfully simulate the experience of talking to a person that it will baffle judges at the upcoming Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence.
But what happens when a Cleverbot talks to another Cleverbot?
Removing humans from the equation, the developers at Cornell set up two Cleverbots for a chat and let them banter back and forth in front of a camera.
The resulting dialogue is oddly entertaining, and even though the bots sometimes struggle to understand each other, they do surprisingly well for the most part. We wouldn't go so far as Gizmodo, whose writers picked up on a sexual tension between the two bots; but we did find ourselves assigning personality traits to them as we watched -- especially to the female bot, who struck us as particularly sassy.
Our personal suggestion to make the party even wilder: invite the iPhone/Android Cleverbot app to the next no-humans-allowed chat session.
WATCH:
Via Buzzfeed
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story suggested that the Cleverbot was designed by the Cornell Machines Lab, when the lab was responsible for incorporating the text-to-speech and avatar features. Cleverbot was designed by Rollo Carpenter.