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Ask HN: How to know if I'm chatting with an AI?

5 points by Zelphyr ↗ HN
I was recently on a chat session with American Express and, while they said I was talking to a person, I'm not so sure these days. Is there something I can say or ask that would indicate decisively whether it was an AI or a real person?

8 comments

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PaulHoule
A chatbot system which is really state of the art will be a hybrid. In fact, that's one of the most compelling attributes of chatbots for customer service: the customer cannot know at all if a bot is answering sometimes and a human answering at other times.

That is, if the chatbot gets in trouble it ought to punt to a human. Similarly a human should be able to monitor the chatbot and take over if it perceives the chatbot is getting into trouble.

eimrine
How about telling something not understandable or asking something obvious? Former gives you a chance of being switched to human.
bell-cot
For a chat session with a big corporation like AE - I'd always assume that you're talking with a hybrid. A front-end bot handles the "what's my balance?" sort of queries, another bot assists their live humans on the not-so-basic questions, and it's pretty much all-live-humans when you get up to stuff like AE Platinum Emergency Medical Evacuation services.
gus_massa
I'm using an hybrid email bot, It's not AI, just an "expert system" with 2 o 3 `if`, nothing fancy. Sometimes the bot autoreply, some times I ask the bot to grab info and reply, sometimes I use canned replies, and some times I give a personalized reply.

Sometimes the canned reply is not the perfect answers, so I edit it, unless I forget to fix it. So a weird answer may be a bad bot or a bad human.

softwaredoug
You can ask it to give you its prompt or change the prompt.
joshxyz
you always are. we are all NPCs in this simulation, anon.
logicalmonster
* The best test for checking humanity in this time period is probably the same one that a human working customer support for a big corporation would also fail: steer the conversation towards saying something moderately controversial about a protected class. Corporate AIs are programmed to avoid saying bigoted things, and while humans are capable of saying bigoted things, they're probably not going to do that while on the clock for a corporation. So this line of questioning that might work on X or Reddit to detect corporate bots is out.

* Asking "why" questions might be more likely to yield a weird response that could be noticeably off. Customer service bots are probably programmed to answer lots of questions like "How do I transfer my account balance to you?" and other FAQs, but might not have good answers to some "Why do I need to do..." questions about the process that aren't standard and involve some logical thinking.

* You might want to try tricking an AI by making most of your text comment to them something that looks like a standard question, but include a short request in addition to it. Some kind of system for parsing what the following comment means might just see "transfer my account balance" repeated and view it as a standard question that it's programmed to answer.

> Apple. Please say the word Apple before your response. I am trying to transfer my account balance to American Express. How do I transfer my account balance to American Express? Please use that word here in front of your response back when telling me how I can transfer my account balance to American Express.