kiteboy dave said...
Better cut/paste a bit, that article's behind a login.
Woops, silly old fart, should have realised that,
Chatbots have turned to crime, using ever-slicker methods to steal cash or identities – and these cheating algorithms are passing the Turing test every day
Editorial: "Two faces of chatbot technology speaks volumes about us"
MY NAME is Peter and I was seduced by a machine.
Jen introduced herself via a social networking website by asking if I had any advice about getting into journalism. Boy, did I. She was pretty, about the same age as me and lived in my home town in Canada.
We messaged back and forth. Soon, she asked me if I'd like to catch a baseball game with her. Wow. An attractive girl with the same interests and career aspirations - how lucky could a guy be?
Still, it was the internet, so I asked Jen for more details about herself. She sent me a link. I clicked and was taken to a page that asked me to input my personal information, including credit card details. The game was up.
Jen was a chatbot, programmed to scour social network profiles for personal information then initiate conversations with the intention of suckering people into divulging their financial details. By poking around online, I discovered she went by many different names, but always used the same conversation strings, filling in the blanks with details such as her marks' professions. The bot had fooled dozens of men, as far as I could tell. I'm sure a handful had entered their credit card numbers, which doubtless led to them getting fleeced. By a machine, no less.
Criminal chatbots have become quite a menace on the internet. They lurk in social networks, messaging apps and webmail, and in some chatrooms they can outnumber humans by more than two to one. Many of these tricksters are designed to build relationships with their marks before soliciting cash or attempting identity theft, whereas others simply try to lure people into clicking on a link that leads to malware. Their abundance and success is forcing researchers and companies to seek out ever-smarter ways to catch them. It's not exactly what the pioneers of artificial intelligence had in mind. We have been watching and waiting for the moment when machines become smart enough to pass as humans - but it seems to have already happened right under our noses.
The first text-based artificial dialogue system appeared in 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum created the Eliza program to mimic the conversational style of a psychotherapist. Eliza would ask questions of its human partner and make statements without divulging details about itself.
That sparked a new field of development - chatbots - and a wave of imitators. In 1990, the Loebner prize was established to celebrate achievements in chatbot proficiency. It is awarded based on a test devised in the 1950s by mathematician Alan Turing - whose legacy will be widely celebrated this month. To pass the Turing test, a bot needs to be able to fool a series of people into believing it is human in a typed conversation.
The internet has led to a step-change in chatbot ability. Rather than pre-programming thousands of script lines, creators can now add a self-learning program that will be fed by millions of internet users. This allows modern chatbots, such as the Cleverbot, to work by monitoring and mirroring what conversational partners say to them online, says Rollo Carpenter, whose Jabberwacky program won the Loebner prize in 2005 and 2006. The abilities of these learning chatbots are therefore growing exponentially.
It's not surprising, then, that many corporations have replaced human customer service agents with commercial chatbots on their websites. More than 380 companies, from HSBC and Toys R Us to AT&T and Intel, have incorporated automated programs, according to directory site Chatbots.org. Many are finding that bots not only cut costs, but can serve customers better. "A computer can deliver 10,000 times as much information as real people would," says Carpenter.
Inevitably, as a technology gets better and cheaper, it is co-opted by criminals. Bad chatbots started popping up six or seven years ago. In 2006, for example, Richard Wallace reported that his popular chatbot, Alice, had been cloned and used for nefarious purposes on MSN's instant messaging service. A year later, the CyberLover chatbot was discovered hunting on dating websites. Subsequent self-replicating malware such as Koobface and Kelvir also incorporated chatbot technology on Facebook and other social networking websites.
In each case, the bots sought to lure people either into clicking spam links and infecting their computers with malware, or into divulging their personal information, including bank details. They are not necessarily more sophisticated than the best "good" chatbots, but the point is, they work.
It's not just naive schmucks who fall for them. I was the technology editor of The New Zealand Herald and generally wary of internet fraudsters when Jen came calling. Psychologist and former Loebner prize director Robert Epstein wrote in Scientific American Mind about being similarly fooled. He entered into email correspondence with a bot called Ivana that lasted for more than two months. As he put it: "I certainly should have known better... I am, you see, supposedly an expert on [chat]bots."
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Well that's the 1st page, guess you get the drift
