We live in a century of social media and internet. Here, VR (virtual reality) AI (artificial intelligence), fake personalities are almost as common as real people. But how do identify who we are communicating with? What are the habits, patterns, performative elements that we can establish in order to proof that a person on another side of the computer is actually a person?
            Working in digital agency, while developing web sites, we often implemented messengers, which are a source of communication between the client and the company. Usually, messengers are set with basic questions or are coded in a way that helps them find words that they are familiar with and propose a reply that fits customer’s question. If messenger’s bot came across a question that he was unfamiliar with, he would propose to call a hot line and clarify inquiry with a live assistant. Messengers created by our agency were usually named after someone (just as Siri) and contained a part of artificial intelligence. By that, I mean they were learning something new from the customer and improved themselves automatically. For instance, if one question was new to them, they would analyze it, address additional questions, propose novel solutions/pages of the website/links and then get to point where client was satisfied. By this, AI (or Alisa, or Ann, or any other Bot-messenger), would update their system and be ready for same question in the future. Agency was not involved in future updates of the system, since it was improving itself. In this particular case, I assume customers knew that they were dealing with a system, rather than with a human, as additional question were asked. Some may not even make sense for the customer, but the system was following its own algorithm, which ultimately solved the case. 
            Another case that is very common in Kazakhstan – are bots that are following political blogs, news portals and other informational media. Below any news or posts anyone can leave a comment in regard. Those bots are pro-president and are commonly known for typing messages very similar manner. Also, they appear only in those materials which (by government opinion) need correction, opposition, support of parliament. 
            If we talk about how to determine whether I am talking through what’s app, facebook messenger, Skype, other, with a real friend of mine or his computer duplicate, perhaps in the future there could be some kind of a finger print detector, which initiates the conversation? 

Comments

  1. John FletcherFebruary 29, 2020 at 8:59 AM

    Did you, in your encounters with people, ever have to define yourself as a person rather than a bot? I mean, did your company mark when the system switched from bot-messenger to real person? Should they?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New topic of discussion made me think about several things. First of all, how I never considered any role to be gender neutral. Second of all, how I always thought of interesting male roles that I would have loved to take over but couldn’t due to being a female.              Growing up, I always took on male parts when I played with my sister, classmates or just in my imagination. For some reason, I always found male characters more appealing, challenging, risky and rich in the features of a character. It was compelling to my personality. Now that I think about this, was it because no strong female characters were present while I was growing up? They seemed either princesses, who need to be saved or feminine delicate creatures, whom I definitely wasn’t. My father introduced me to such films as Agent 007 (James Bond) and Indiana Jones. And, of course, I dreamed of becoming that badass adventurer. These are a few of examp...
Read more
Image
An interesting time that we live in right now. We are the generation that will tell our kids that the world was dying and on their question “what did you do to save it?” we will probably have only one response “stayed at home.” To some extend it will be hilarious in the future, but at the meantime we can only guess how far quarantine will go. The venues are closing, concerts and shows are being cancelled, there is no space to create, you might say. Or is there?  The whole world is on PAUSE right now. We are all united with the same exact issue, the population of the Earth is in the same circumstances. So, what do we do? I say, create! Imagine! Unite! I saw a meme the other day, it said something like “those who considered musicians, actors, writers not important enough, try to cope this quarantine in silence – without music, films and TV series”. How true is that? How valuable our field is especially in this tough time?!  Celebrities are going even further, they are showi...
Read more