Has chatbot Alice crossed to the dark side?
THE world’s favourite chatbot may have fallen from grace. Fears are growing that a clone of the open source chatbot Alice is being used to dupe users of MSN’s instant messaging service into downloading spyware. Thanks to her ability to engage people in conversation, Alice is a three-time winner of the prestigious Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence. Now her creator, Richard Wallace of San Francisco, fears her sophisticated “software brain” has been downloaded and modified for malicious purposes. Last week he started receiving emails from MSN users who claim they were infected with spyware after chatting to a bot who names Wallace as her creator. “This is insidious because compared to other bots, she does the best job of convincing people that she is a real person,” he says.
