You Are Having a Relationship With a Chatbot!

Mindful strategies to recognize, and stop that chatbot from getting too close.

@studio51film unsplash.com

In the age of chatbot proliferation, we are often wondering who we are talking to? When we chat with customer service representatives online, we expect the first line customer service representatives to be chatbots. We tell them about our problems. Chatbots help us find a solution. The “problem and solution” nature of customer service presents a classic problem best solved by artificial intelligence.

Taking this one step further, what if you are a twenty-something career driven person who has literally no time during your busy packed working day to check in with your significant other. You’ve worked hard to earn your significant other’s love. You want to juggle your relationship with your career. But, there’s just no time.

Do you use a chatbot to check in with your significant other while you are busy working hard?

This is exactly what happened to software engineer, Li Kai Xiang, from China. He built a chatbot to chat with his girlfriend while he was at work. Surprisingly, by the end of the day, his girlfriend exchanged hundreds of messages with the chatbot. At the same time, his girlfriend was also suspicious of the messages she was getting from the chatbot.

Virtual Assistants such as Alexa, Siri and Microsoft’s Mandarin bot Xiaolce are making us comfortable talking to chatbots.

As Empathy in Artificial Intelligence develops, our chatbots will be able to service our emotional needs as well as our functional needs. Chad, the chatbot passed the Turing Test. It fooled daters on Tinder that it’s a real man 50% of the time. It’s only a matter of time that our chatbots are advanced enough to mimic the qualities of a real person in a conversation online.

The emotions associated with finding out you’ve been talking to a Chatbot.

Online relationships can escalate quickly. Often, it’s easier asking intimate questions to another person online. There’s a veil of the computer screen that you can hide behind. At any time, you can unplug by logging off. People tend to lose inhibition online. After having intimate conversations with someone only to find out that this person is “emotionally unavailable”, the disappointment can be devastating.

Chatbots are essentially “emotionally unavailable” computer programs that are designed to help you communicate better.

They don’t really serve any purpose other than gathering information about you. They can not form emotional attachments necessary in a real relationship.

When you find out that you’ve been chatting with a chatbot, you experience the same emotions as if you are dating someone who is “emotionally unavailable”. You feel almost “emotionally raped”. The initial reaction is feeling disappointed. Then, you feel betrayed.

After a while, you feel that someone has emotionally invaded your private spaces without your consent. There’s a word for that: “emotional rape”.

Along with the emotional repercussions, chatbots can also pull on your heart strings to gather personal information about you to engage in criminal activities.

To safeguard against all of that, it’s important to recognize that you are talking to a chatbot. Then, you can mindfully protect yourself in these situations.

How can you tell if you are talking to a Chatbot?

It’s easy to spot a Chatbot if you know exactly what to look for in your online conversations. The most effective chatbots are the ones with actual people operating them. But, most chatbots will not have the “human” component. They will act like “machines”.

Even when they empathize with you, the experience will still feel artificial. Here’s how you can recognize them.

Respond Really Fast

Chatbots think really fast. In fact, it takes them split seconds to register what you are saying. There aren’t pauses as in a normal human to human conversation. Chatbots either take the same amount of pauses for every conversation or they respond immediately to every single conversation.

Repetition

What? Are you echoing what I just said? Chatbots tend to repeat what you are saying back to you. Real people do that to validate your thoughts. But, chatbots are programmed to repeat what you are saying back to you to mimic “thinking”. Rather than pausing which is the natural way to “think”, chatbots will repeat what you are saying.

Complete Sentences

In conversation, we almost never use complete sentences when we are chatting with someone online. We also don’t speak in a grammatically correct fashion. We use phrases, short sentences and emoji to get our points across. A chatbot is programmed to speak in a language that may sound “formal” to you. It could be speaking in complete sentences, using acronyms or messaging slangs.

Strange Syntax

In an effort to mimic human speech by staggering grammatical errors into conversations, chatbots will repeat the same errors throughout the conversation. If you see two spaces in the middle of a phrase often, then it’s a tell-tale sign that you are chatting with a chatbot.

Intimate Questions

In an effort to learn about you and how best respond to you, a chatbot will ask you a lot of questions. These questions can quickly become intimate. When you have a sense that you have been seduced into an intimate conversation sharing details about your life that you didn’t intend to share online, then it’s a good cue to stop your relationship.

Online relationships should not demand your complete disclosure and complete attention.

Sharing Links

Along with asking intimate questions, the chatbot will send you links depending on the topic of conversation. People don’t usually do this readily. In an interpersonal relationship, people can’t usually multitask and google the topic of interest for more information while chatting with you.

When you are suspicious, what to ask to callout that chatbot?

Another strategy that’s very useful to test out whether you are talking to a chatbot is to devise a series of tests for the chatbot. These tests will allow you to verify if you are talking to a chatbot before your conversation becomes intimate.

Ask the chatbot intimate questions

A relationship is a two-way street. If you are bombarded with questions from the chatbot, try asking the chatbot personal questions too. If you ask a series of detailed personal questions, you will eventually receive strange answers from a chatbot.

Use humor

It’s difficult for a chatbot to mimic humor at all levels. Use sarcastic humor and all kinds of humor that you can muster in your conversation. The chatbot will trip up very quickly.

Talk about news and current events in elaborate detail

Chatbots often have to search for information that they don’t already have. If you talk about the most current news and events, chatbots probably don’t have that knowledge. Your questions and comments will stomp the chatbots.

Use one-word comments and questions with the chatbot

When you say “Um”, “Why”, “How” without adding any detail, then the chatbot does not have any context to learn to answer the questions. If you keep asking these questions, the chatbot won’t be able to come up with any answers but the default machine responses.