Debunking Art - fraudster with python AI engine?

[Nick]

Hi,

I recently went to an art exhibition, and one of the artists had an AI
engine projected onto a screen with a keyboard for visitors to type
questions in with.

Curiously, I asked the artist if he had written the engine. He claimed
to have, but as far as I know, he has done no AI study, and only
started programming python some months ago.

Naturally, I find it hard to believe he has picked up on natural
language processing and the other various skills required to write AI
engines in that time. My guess is he has a python AIML interpreter,
and he's found a default "brain" somewhere and tweaked it with some of
his own stuff in order to pass it off as his own.

The engine could answer all the usual questions, like "what is the
meaning of life" (42), "what is your name", "how old are you" etc etc.
It was just a chatterbot, so ELIZA or a deriviative is marked off the
list. I am guessing probably an ALICE engine is behind it all. Does
anyone know any questions or commands one can issue the bot which
might identify it? It required all questions to start with a capital
letter, if thats any help.

Cheers,

Nick.

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[Anthony McDonald]

Hi,

I recently went to an art exhibition, and one of the artists had an AI
engine projected onto a screen with a keyboard for visitors to type
questions in with.

Curiously, I asked the artist if he had written the engine. He claimed
to have, but as far as I know, he has done no AI study, and only
started programming python some months ago.

Naturally, I find it hard to believe he has picked up on natural
language processing and the other various skills required to write AI
engines in that time. My guess is he has a python AIML interpreter,
and he's found a default "brain" somewhere and tweaked it with some of
his own stuff in order to pass it off as his own.

The engine could answer all the usual questions, like "what is the
meaning of life" (42), "what is your name", "how old are you" etc etc.
It was just a chatterbot, so ELIZA or a deriviative is marked off the
list. I am guessing probably an ALICE engine is behind it all. Does
anyone know any questions or commands one can issue the bot which
might identify it? It required all questions to start with a capital
letter, if thats any help.

Cheers,

Nick.

From the evidence you present clearly this is a fraud. Mastery of Python in
just a few months with no prior programming experience is definately fishy!
And never having formerly studied AI or read the tomes of literature on the
subject..... why oh why do we tolerate such lies and falsehoods from our
"artists". I for one vote to repress them into just painting what the eye
can really see ;-)'s

Originally I had planned to write a response from this point onwards about
how simple it would be to achieve what you've described. Firstly I'd have
mentioned that a little research would bring you to say something like
Markov chains for emulating natural language structure (a number of the
recent and best chatterboxes have used this technique). I'd have followed up
with how these are crazily simple to implement in Python using just a
dictionary and lists. And I'd have finished up by mentioning that Markov
chains along with a lot of other statistical tools and algorithms originally
developed outside of AI research have over time been brought into this
field.

Then I spoke with my Girlfriend who's an artist and not an IT professional.
Who explained about the artist showing how life is really an
anthropormorphic projection of ourselves onto other objects. How in our
desire to communicate intelligently we project our own intelligence into
everyday associations. How from this we can create our own Deus ex Machina
based merely on responses that seem natural to us but as yet we don't
understand. But I don't believe any of that, hell she thinks clippy is cute
's

But it explains your question fairly well. Presented with a non comp sci
graduate doing something that appears to be the domain of a lifetimes AI
research, you've projected your inability to do the task onto them and
formulated the response that plagurism is at the heart of the matter. You've
failed to see through the smoke and mirrors and spot just how easy on one
hand Python is to learn, and just how much power on the other hand it allows
you to lever. And you've forgotten that Google is not just an IPO its also
your friend for research.

I wish you luck in your quest to prove this was a fraud. As for me its back
to updating skynet 1.0 to use decorators and some new introspection tricks
;-)'s

Anthony McDonald

 

[Steve Holden]

Hi,

I recently went to an art exhibition, and one of the artists had an AI
engine projected onto a screen with a keyboard for visitors to type
questions in with.

Curiously, I asked the artist if he had written the engine. He claimed
to have, but as far as I know, he has done no AI study, and only
started programming python some months ago.

Naturally, I find it hard to believe he has picked up on natural
language processing and the other various skills required to write AI
engines in that time. My guess is he has a python AIML interpreter,
and he's found a default "brain" somewhere and tweaked it with some of
his own stuff in order to pass it off as his own.

The engine could answer all the usual questions, like "what is the
meaning of life" (42), "what is your name", "how old are you" etc etc.
It was just a chatterbot, so ELIZA or a deriviative is marked off the
list. I am guessing probably an ALICE engine is behind it all. Does
anyone know any questions or commands one can issue the bot which
might identify it? It required all questions to start with a capital
letter, if thats any help.

Cheers,

Nick.

The artist wasn't, by any chance, called "Timothy", was he?

regards
Steve

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[Magnus Lie Hetland]

Hi,

I recently went to an art exhibition, and one of the artists had an AI
engine projected onto a screen with a keyboard for visitors to type
questions in with.

[snip]

Are you sure it wasn't connected to a network (perhaps well hidden)?
In that case the "AI engine" could just be another person sitting
somewhere, snickering... (Turing test, anyone?)



--
Magnus Lie Hetland "Canned Bread: The greatest thing since sliced
http://hetland.org bread!" [from a can in Spongebob Squarepants]

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[Tom B.]

Hi,

I recently went to an art exhibition, and one of the artists had an AI
engine projected onto a screen with a keyboard for visitors to type
questions in with.

Curiously, I asked the artist if he had written the engine. He claimed
to have, but as far as I know, he has done no AI study, and only
started programming python some months ago.

Naturally, I find it hard to believe he has picked up on natural
language processing and the other various skills required to write AI
engines in that time. My guess is he has a python AIML interpreter,
and he's found a default "brain" somewhere and tweaked it with some of
his own stuff in order to pass it off as his own.

The engine could answer all the usual questions, like "what is the
meaning of life" (42), "what is your name", "how old are you" etc etc.
It was just a chatterbot, so ELIZA or a deriviative is marked off the
list. I am guessing probably an ALICE engine is behind it all. Does
anyone know any questions or commands one can issue the bot which
might identify it? It required all questions to start with a capital
letter, if thats any help.

Cheers,

Nick.

Python is all about getting the proper module and using it. Do you believe
those that use wxPython or Tk to be frauds.

Tom

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[Terry Reedy]

Python is all about getting the proper module and using it. Do you believe
those that use wxPython or Tk to be frauds.

Do people who use wxPython (a gui *engine*) claim to have written it?

It is possible the the artist misunderstood the question and only meant to
say that he had written the application on top of the engine. But I was
not there.

Terry J. Reedy

 

[Chris S.]

Naturally, I find it hard to believe he has picked up on natural
language processing and the other various skills required to write AI
engines in that time. My guess is he has a python AIML interpreter,
and he's found a default "brain" somewhere and tweaked it with some of
his own stuff in order to pass it off as his own.

So what's the problem? You make it sound like he *must* be plagerizing
someone else's work, but PyAIML is for creating just such an interface.
There are even free brains available. Considering the term "AI engine"
has no official meaning, a shell powered by an AIML interpreter could
easily be one of many possible solutions to such a setup.

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[Nick]

So what's the problem? You make it sound like he *must* be plagerizing
someone else's work, but PyAIML is for creating just such an interface.
There are even free brains available. Considering the term "AI engine"
has no official meaning, a shell powered by an AIML interpreter could
easily be one of many possible solutions to such a setup.

Well, if I were using a cryptographic library, I wouldn't dare claim I
were a cryptographer. I may say that I had written an application that
uses a third party cryptographic component... I think in this context
he is using the fact that the chances of a technical person
questioning his work are extremely slim.

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[Chris S.]

Well, if I were using a cryptographic library, I wouldn't dare claim I
were a cryptographer. I may say that I had written an application that
uses a third party cryptographic component... I think in this context
he is using the fact that the chances of a technical person
questioning his work are extremely slim.

Did he claim to be an AI expert? From the description you gave of the
"engine", it would seem little or no AI study would be necessary for
such a trivial implementation. Either way, lying or not, such a setup is
unlikely to do him any good in the long run. If anything, you should
have had a little fun with him and questioned him thoroughly, trying to
trip him up if he was indeed faking.

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[Jeff Shannon]

Well, if I were using a cryptographic library, I wouldn't dare claim I
were a cryptographer. I may say that I had written an application that
uses a third party cryptographic component... I think in this context
he is using the fact that the chances of a technical person
questioning his work are extremely slim.

It's also possible that he simply misunderstood what you meant by
"engine", and was meaning to say that he wrote the program (using
available libraries). The breakdown of a program into functional
components is not as obvious as many of us tend to think, and the naming
of those components is even less obvious. I can easily see a
nontechnical hobbyist-programmer, who's taken an off-the-shelf NLP
library and customized its responses to particular words/phrases, not
seeing this as being an entirely different thing than writing an AI
engine (when he has perhaps never heard the term "AI engine" before).

The important thing, here, at least to my mind, is whether or not this
installation was interesting as a piece of art. If it was interesting,
then I could care less whether the artist (metaphorically) made his own
paints or got them at the local hobby store -- even if he *is*
stretching the truth about which he'd done.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International

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