One of the hottest topics of the last few years has been AI in all its forms, everything from simple female-named chatting tools, to domesday predictions that AI will kill us all, or at least make us fat and obsolete in the workplace.

So far what we’ve seen and been able to play with has mostly been in the form of chat bots, helping us navigate over-complicated websites or get some very limited customer service help.

November 6, 2001 “Treehouse of Horror XII” was aired, with Pierce Brosnan starring as Ultrahouse 3000. A smart building AI that becomes attracted to Marge and decides to get rid of Homer, attempting to kill him by dumping him into the dining room table’s garbage disposal — many of the common fears of what an AI eventually will do to us.

Bank bots to crazy bots

Some of you might remember that a few years back it felt like most service providers started using Automated online assistants like Anna from IKEA here, often used by banks or insurance companies to provide visitors with another form of customer service.

In these early days chat bots were usually quite useless but a bit fun to play with the first few times you interacted with them, especially as a kid discovering the limited anonymity of the Internet.

Microsoft experienced the same kind of problems after they launched their chat bot Tay earlier this year. Tay soon discovered that the Internet can be a dark and foul-mouthed place, and maybe too much for innocent sweet chat bots. Within one day it had a big Twitter meltdown and was offending almost everything and everyone.

Examples of Tay’s tweets on that day included, “Bush did 9/11” and “Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey [Barack Obama] we have got now. Donald Trump is the only hope we’ve got” as well as “F**k my robot p**sy daddy I’m such a naughty robot.” (Wikipedia).

Which was all very understandable to AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy, as Microsoft had not given the bot an understanding of inappropriate behaviour so it merely suffered the wrath of Internet trolls from around the world.

RoboCoke has all the right contacts

There’s was even a Hungarian party and music recommendation chat bot called RoboCoke created for Coca Cola, your perfect party friend: “RoboCoke is the virtual agent of the Hungarian Coke website. He can give you party and concert recommendations all over Hungary” (Chatbots.org)

It turned out to be a success; with more than 185,000 conversations and 5,130,000 messages in just a few weeks. I mean who wouldn’t want him to help for a night out?

If you head over to chatbots.org you can find some other gems to play with for a bit, such as the Drumpf Bot.