Reading: Half-Sentence Matching - 2021 őszi

Robert Epstein was looking for love. As he recounted in the journal Scientific American Mind, he began a promising email exchange with a pretty, warm and friendly girl in Russia. Soon she confessed she was developing a crush on him. "I have very special feelings about you, a beautiful flower blossoming in my soul..." It took a long while for Epstein to notice that Ivana never really responded directly to his questions. Suspicious, he eventually sent her a line of pure bang-on-the-keyboard gibberish. She responded by repeating sweet nothings about how much she liked him. At last, Epstein realised the truth: Ivana was a chatbot. What makes the story surprising is not that a chatbot managed to trick a lonely middle-aged man. It is that the man who was tricked was one of the founders of a test of artificial conversation in which computers try to fool humans into thinking that they, too, are human. In other words, one of the world's top chatbot experts had spent two months writing love letters to a computer programme. One of the first and most famous early chatbots, Eliza, would successfully imitate a human psychotherapist. It was programmed in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum. If you typed, "my husband made me come here", Eliza might simply reply, "your husband made you come here." If you mentioned feeling angry, Eliza might ask, "do you think coming here will help you not to feel angry?" People did not care that Eliza was not human: they seemed pleased that someone would listen to them without judgement. Weizenbaum's secretary famously asked him to leave the room so that she could talk to Eliza in private. Psychotherapists were fascinated. A contemporary article in a medical journal said that "several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system." Supervising an army of bots, the human therapist would be far more efficient. And indeed, some therapies are now administered by chatbots, such as Woebot. There is no pretence that they are human. Chatbots are now widely used in call centres, handling a growing number of complaints and enquiries. Babylon Health is a chatbot that quizzes people about their medical symptoms and decides whether they should be referred to a doctor. Economists today argue that automation reshapes jobs rather than destroying them. Computers take over the routine tasks and humans supply the creativity and adaptability.