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Comment by seanlevan | Hacker News Reader

From a strictly technical point of view, it is at least some form of Artificial Intelligence:

1) From the perspective of the Turing Test, it biomimics human behavior and intelligence.

2) The field of artificial intelligence deals with a computerized comprehension of data. ACUMAN is heavily dependent on machine learning, natural language processing, and text classification algorithms, which facilitate understanding. It also gathers psychometric data, which allows the machine to take its communication with a participant in context of their personality.

3) A computer able to interact with a human in a similar way that a human would with another human. ACUMAN matches this definition because it accepts and can converse in both speech input and text input, all in the english language and manifesting its "intelligence" in the form daily communication.

The project qualifies to all three of these pieces of criteria.

http://acuman.us/readmore.php

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Edit: just realised you're the author, so I want to reiterate: this is a lovely designed app and making your own chatbot is rad. Original reply below.

Re 1. Yes, it does attempt to pass the Turing test.

Re 3. Yes, that includes interacting with a human in a similar way that a human would with another human, that's part of the Turing test.

My own experience was: it asked me how I was, I told it I had a hangover, it thought that was great and that I was 100% happy. Which wasn't a long test. Obviously your own experience might have varied.

Re: 3. Isn't machine learning just machine learning and NLP just NLP?

I personally don't feel like my app suddenly becomes 'AI' if I import nltk and start tokenising some corpus to train it with, or load opencv and tell my drone to avoid the big red thing. If the app would work out how to /train itself/ I would consider it an AI.

Eg, the drone having the objective to follow me at a safe distance for as long as possible, then working out that the big red thing is dangerous and avoid it.

Or the chat both to, say, have an objective of beating the human at the turing test for a certain amount of time, then working out how it gives itself away, then avoiding doing that.

I acknowledge that's just a feeling though, and many definitions online would qualify 'thing that loads library and needs human training' as AI.

However I can't help but think that's going to promote the Reading University 'captain cyborg' school of cranks.

Isn't machine learning a first step towards "how to train itself" ?

Honestly, I would say "chatbot" is a class of primitive AI - I'd also class Eliza as an (extremely) primitive AI.

I feel like you're making a distinction without a difference because you have some arbitrary barrier in mind for "sufficiently non-primitive to have earned the term AI" and are then applying that.

Would "a chatbot with primitive AI capabilities" seem like a reasonable compromise definition?

Yes, that seems reasonable.

I'm glad you took the time to elaborate on this. It's impressive how quickly people came to conflate "AI" with either the general human-level form of intelligence or things they've seen in movies.

Do you have an example of it taking personality into account?

Yes. If you were in a noticeably bad mood, the bot might make a comment on it. It also picks on your hobbies and goals, and asks more questions about them or reminds you to follow through with them.

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