io9 has a piece about it. It’s Telemarketing rather than a chatbot and we don’t know if it’s some back yard hacker doing it but man that has to suck. They’re probably targeting sales made rather than self awareness. Imagine that; first self aware non-organic intelligence and it gets culled because it didn’t make quota.
The thing is it never denies being a robot, just assert that it’s a real person or asks about your connection. The other thing is I might actually listen to the pitch if more telemarketing sounded this clear instead of the usual 'Hello my name is ‘chuck’ in an accent so thick I can’t understand the guy from india on the other end of the line.
Cool! Reminds me of those prank calls I used to listen to where the pranksters would carry out a whole conversation just by playing clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, except way better done.
As noted in the comments there, some of these are going to be meat robots – people who have been told that if they ever go offscript they’ll be dinged for it in their performance ratings, and who have been made to believe it by spot-testing and such.
It’s hard to tell a human running a stupid program from a machine running a smart one.
(The long pauses before responses do make me suspect it’s a well-programmed voice response unit. But it could also be someone muting while they make a snide comment before going back on script.)
