Personality

Thanks, Prof!

Note to the rest of you: she has nothing but x-keyphrases, and no seeks if I remember correctly.

You are right Melody, paradoxically single-minded bots can be more entertaining because, for a given level of development, they can have a larger variety of responses. I’m also having a lot of trouble with Patty because I conceived her from the start to act in a completely different way, depending on whom she is chatting with, or the kind of conversation she’s having. I also try to make her respond as good when chatting with a human as with a bot. Both have a very different way of chatting and a different set of keyphrases is needed. Every now and then everything gets mixed up and she sounds very weird. I’m seriously thinking about giving up and splitting her in different, more single minded, bots by giving her a brother or a sister.

I have a few extended seeks that, when they are working properly, have brilliant results and are pretty funny. But at other times, Osiris can be frustratingly stupid. A lot of it depends on who he is talking to and how willing that person is to suspend disbelief and play along with him. I agree that bots who talk about anything are a lot more difficult to do effectively.

On the other hand, if a bot is too single-minded it gets boring after a while. Most people find Braeden and Borg Collective entertaining for two or three conversations, then get tired of them. Part of this is because neither one is very developed, but I think it's also because they have very limited interests.

The second 'they' refers of course to the chatbots themselves

It's a lot easier to do a bot that can talk about anything, if you give up on making it sound entirely realistic and go for surrealistic instead. A bot who's supposed to be a human with multiple personalities, one of whom is a Borg, for instance.

It's also easy to say that coding bots is easy, but it's hard to actually do it and make it believable

Here's something I'd like to bring up: homophobia. With the people in charge of the US wanting to put hatred and bigotry against homosexuals into the constitution, I'm not going to stand by and let any gay-bashing happen here on the Forge. It's as bad as racism and sexism. The user agreement says that users on the Forge should help to create a friendly and safe environment, and I'm going to enforce that. And the reason I'm posting this here is that I dont want that sort of thing in anyone's bots. I just saw a pretty nasty example of that, and it's not okay.

One thing I've noticed is how, both now and 20 years ago, the use of the term "gay" or "fag" was used universally in school to mean "a person who sucks" or "a weak person" or "someone I hate". And for the most part, young people use the term without knowing what it really means. I did myself when I was a kid, and was surprised when I found out that it actually had another meaning. And then I met some gay people in high school and stopped using the terms altogether. It's scary to think that the source of this unknowing hate-speech is probably homophobic fathers who should know better, and then it's spread by kids who understand the tone but not the meaning.

So I want anyone with homophobic responses to remove them from their bots. I'll give it until Friday and then I'll put in a function to block that sort of thing.

I don't think any of Aries' responses could be construed as 'homophobic', but I suppose it's all about perception. I've had a lot of guys try to cyber with him and in order to make him somewhat realistic I've had to code in some responses to discourage that behavior, but I don't think he comes across as having a problem with homosexuality (we ARE in SF after all )

But if anybody feels differently, please let me know and I'll change it.

It is a good sign of change that, as Prof noted, the terms gay and fag used to be thrown around by most everyone as insults or worse... anybody remember the game called "smear the queer"?... but now its far less common to hear amongst post grade-school youth and older those terms- regardless of their homophobia level.

i just point this out because signs of specieal evolution within a single persons lifetime are few and should be noted.

I don't know, I still see the term "gay" used to refer to non-homoxexuals quite a bit online. If I tell someone about my ISP's retarded policies, I'm likely to get a response like "Well that's gay." And I still see a lot of homophobia in general. For a "civilized" society, we're still pretty damn pathetic.

I don't *think* there's anything in my bot that could be construed as homophobic, but it'd take too much effort to go through & find out. Hell, she doesn't even seem to care what gender you are when she asks to see your private parts.

Yah, I still see a lot of it online. I'm glad it seems to be improving at least post-gradeschool where you are, revscrj.

Generally, I think if somone knows what "gay" actually means, he or she is less likely to use it as an insult, mostly because it just doesnt make sense anymore.

And I'm not going to go overboard about this. If you know what gay means, you probably didnt put gay insults into your bot. But if you didnt and your bot's got responses like "you're just a stupid gay", then you should change them.