We know Google is big on AI research – it acquired Deepmind last year, has partnered with Oxford University and is packing intelligence into everything from self-driving cars to Google Now. But sometimes that can be a little creepy.

A research paper published this week, blandly titled ‘A Neural Conversational Model,’ and authored by Oriol Vinyals of the Google Brain team and Quoc V. Le, a Google researcher at Stanford, includes some unsettling human/computer interactions.

The project looked at conversational modeling (predicting what will come next in a dialogue), which is key to natural language understanding and machine intelligence.

It involved testing a model with a dataset made up of IT helpdesk questions and another, more complex one, comprised of excerpts from movie transcripts.

When the computer was providing IT support, it did a pretty good job [Note – grammar and spelling rendered as shown in the research paper]:

Machine: what is the error that you are running please

Human: i am seeing an error related to vpn

Machine: what is the error message that you are getting when connecting to vpn using network connect?

Human: connection refused or something like that

Machine: may i know the version of network connect you connect?

Human: i am not sure i know that

Machine: is the network connect prompting for any user certificate

Machine: ?

Human: yes

Machine: are you at home or at work at the moment?

Machine: office?

Human: i am at home

Machine: try this

Machine: goto page and enter your name and password

Human: done

Machine: try logging in with and check if its working fine now

Human: yes, now it works !

But when the computer was tasked with responding to the movie dialogue, the conversations are unsettling in the extreme:

Human: what is the purpose of life?

Machine: to serve the greater good.

Human: what is the purpose of living?

Machine: to live forever.

Hello, Skynet. It gets worse when the conversation moves on to morality:

Human: what is moral?

Machine: what empowered humanity, what intellectual the essence is .

Human: what is immoral?

Machine: the fact that you have a child.

Thankfully, while the researchers “find it encouraging that the model can remember facts, understand contexts [and] perform common sense reasoning,” they admit their basic model provides “unsatisfying answers” and “does not capture a consistent personality.”

That should mean we’re still a long way from being lectured by replicants about “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.” But with Google also building terrifying robot dogs, we must remain ever vigilant.

➤ A Neural Conversational Model [PDF via Arxiv]

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Image credit: Bubbye on Imgur

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