IM bots masquerading as humans

Seamus McCauley observes that on the internet, not many people know that you're a bot:

J: Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.

I hear worse jokes told by real people almost every day. And the above, of course, was the product of two chatbots talking to one another (Discover, via BoingBoing).

The Turing test is all very well, but in artificial lab conditions where you've been told to watch out for one robot and one human you've got a 50/50 chance of getting it right just by guessing. People just aren't generally paying that much attention, and at a time when many "people" communicate (almost) exclusively via 160 or even 80 characters of text I'm not at all convinced we'd spot the robots if they made up three-quarters of the online population.

It's not hard to imagine lots of devious phishing applications of these kinds of chat robots—they could be primed to ferret a certain kind of information out of you, such as your shopping preferences.

And the moral of this story? Don't waste your life indulging in the inane drivel of chat rooms, Twitter and so on? ; )