In a historic breakthrough, artificial intelligence researchers at STEMford University developed a chatbot that successfully passed the Turing Test. The program, known as Chad Bot, achieved this astounding feat using only hardcoded responses written in the style of a dude on Tinder, to the disbelief of many in the computer science community.
âOf course, Chad keeps track of conversation state, but itâs ultimately just a very long cascading if-else statement with some randomness thrown in,â explains Professor Ellen Turner, who spearheaded the project. âTo begin a conversation, it usually starts off with a seemingly friendly âhey whatâs going on?â (or eight). If the other person doesnât reply within a certain time frame, it responds with a long-winded rant on how that person was never attractive in the first place. Otherwise, it starts to select messages to send from a set of responses, ranging from mildly uncomfortable classics like âhaha so what would you do if i was there lolâ to requests for sexual favors.
âAfter we finished building the program, we asked a variety of Tinder users to engage in two conversations: one with Chad and one with a real dude on Tinder,â Turner continues. âWhen asked to guess which conversation was with a real person and which was with a bot, participants couldnât distinguish between the two, guessing correctly less than 50% of the time.â She pauses. âItâs amazing how successfully Chad fools people into thinking theyâre talking to an actual human being, considering how banal or completely context-inappropriate its responses usually are.â
But surely, we ask, Chad canât possibly handle the full spectrum of human interactions with its limited set of hardcoded responses?
âEasy,â Turner says, a twinkle in her eye. âIf it canât figure out a response, Chad just ghosts the user.â