https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kx8ay/facebooks-new-chatbot-is-unsure-if-mark-zuckerberg-is-a-murderer

Four years ago, I interviewed an AI researcher working on natural language processing at Facebook. He told me that, though there have been many chatbots, most of them are bad because we still don’t have the technology to make them think for themselves—that they are, essentially, still using massive lookup databases to approximate something resembling a human conversation. Any time a conversation enters an “open domain"—meaning it spans multiple topics or isn’t doing a very specific thing (looking up directions, or telling you movie times, for example)—the conversation can go off the rails.

Friday, two Facebook researchers announced in a blog post that Facebook has made some significant progress that addresses some of the weaknesses of open domain chatbots. Facebook’s advances will make chatbot conversations more specific, more consistent, more empathetic, help them more easily recall earlier parts of a conversation, and able to respond to images, the company says. As part of this announcement, Facebook rolled out a new chatbot game that will “provide researchers with high-signal data from live interactions instead of fixed language data.”