“Paedophiles attempting to ‘groom’ children in internet chatrooms can now be detected by a computer program. The program works by putting on a convincing impression of a young person taking part in a chatroom conversation. At the same time it analyses the behaviour of the person it is chatting with, looking for classic signs of grooming: paedophiles pose as children as they attempt to arrange meetings with the children they befriend. Called ChatNannies, the software was developed in the UK by Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. It creates thousands of sub-programs, called nanniebots, which log on to different chatrooms and strike up conversations with users and groups of users. If a nanniebot detects suspicious activity it sends an alert to Wightman and emails a transcript of the conversation. If he considers the transcript suspicious, he contacts the relevant police force, giving them the internet address of the suspect user.” — New Scientist (US)

First there was the porn chat bot that could enter online chat rooms and maintain smutty conversations in such convincing fashion that some claim it can pass the Turing test, the benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now this British programmer has turned the tables and created an equally intelligent bot whose mission is not to talk dirty but to prevent adults from chatting up jailbait. No doubt it’s a noble innovation in technology, but it sure makes you wonder about the possibilities….

What happens when these bots outnumber human participants in chat rooms? After all, if in principle you can’t tell a bot from a human, then a bot can’t distinguish whether it’s talking to a fellow bot either. What if they get stuck in escalating wars of words, repeat loops of sexual tentatives followed by stentorian admonishments? Humans would get bored and log off, but the bots could go at it forever, bellicose machines not knowing when to quit or not even knowing what constitutes victory… And you thought spam clogged the channels!

The article contains the transcript of a “sample” chat, and if you think about the fact that it’s computer-generated, it seems pretty sophisticated — meaning that it’s not easy to program such random bullshit. But if you look at it from the vantage point of a chat-room participant, it’s just that — random bullshit. The sample conversation involves British holidays, pancakes, and the movie Robocop. And it’s not a matter of taking advantage of a holiday to watch Robocop and do perverted things with pancake batter. Weirdly, there’s no sex whatsoever in the conversation — which makes you wonder exactly what the “nanniebot” is watching out for.

Go read the transcript and see if you can guess which is the bot and which the human — then go read it again and see if you’d bother logging into any chat room that featured such drivel. Schopenhauer once said that to speak is to utter commonplaces, and apparently technology has become so advanced now that artificial intelligence consists of programming them as well.

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