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Comment by DoubleMalt | Hacker News Reader

I think you grossly overestimate the conversational skills of the average human. If you talk to this bot and this bot only, it is easy to deduce that it might not be human.

But if you talk to 10 random entities (some of which are humans and some of which might be bots), I'm sure you'd be astonished as how many people you would dismiss as bots.

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  Me: I have a pet squirrel. What kind of pet do I have?
  Him: I have a guinea pig. Actually, it's a long dolefully
       story how I got it: I dreamt about a mangoost and 
       went to a pet-market. And one old geezer sold me a 
       "mangoost". But in reality it appeared to be a guinea 
       pig! Cheater...

How many people do you think would ignore my question like this? I would understand a response such as "You just told me - why ask?" or "Did you mean to say 'you' instead of 'I'?" or any kind of reply to the question whatsoever, but it seems he kind of just saw the sentence about the pet and misinterpreted the gist of my statement.

He didn't "ignore" your question, he mis-read it. Some people would do the same. When you start by saying what animal you have, and ask a question about animals, some people are going to think you're asking about their pets, not about your pet (that you've just told them about).

Plenty of people would have thought you said "I have a pet squirrel. What pet do you have?"

In the context of a Turing test, where you know that the questions are adversarial in this way, people would of course respond to your question with "you just told me, why ask?"

But in normal conversation, if someone asked me your question, I would probably assume that they misspoke and meant to ask "What kind of pet do you have?" since that's a much more likely question. Then I might respond like this bot did.

Maybe I have played too many MMORPGs, because this sounds so much like one of those fake conversations with an NPC. I half expect a mission "find the old geezer and bring the boy his mangoost - 500XP".

Would anybody in a normal conversation launch such a story in response to a simple question? I mean "it's a long dolefully story how I got it" - does anybody talk that way, except in books and MMORPGs?

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