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Browsing the time sink known as Reddit today I came across a very cool comic showing someone building a chat-bot to debate a theist. I googled the title of the comic and found the original as well a very awesome comic called Bag of Toast. I highly recommend checking it out.
The comic in question:
This made me think that I would love a chat bot to debate the theists, global warming deniers, anti-vaccine advocates, scumbags MRAs, or anyone I disagree with but constantly have to have 101 level discussions with. It would be wonderful. But then the Reddit community came through and proved there is such a thing already!
Christopher Mims at MIT Technology Review writes:
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
Sadly this chat bot has since been suspended, but given how easy it is to create twitter accounts I’m sure it is out there somewhere, debating science deniers so that we don’t have to. Finding out this bot existed has made today a good day.
Your opinions…