Artificial Friends ?

Now first off let me say that this article is not about people who pretend to be ur friends and stab you in the back or anything of the sort ........

its actually about ARTIFICIAL friends .....

i was at work today ......... working hard ......... on msn messenger :)
well actually it was e-buddy; an online version of messenger that u can use when ur pretending to be working

anyway u get my drift (work, computer, pretending ...... messenger )

i saw this program being advertised on e-buddy's home page called Spleak- the virtual girl.

now being the bored soul that i am during my ever so exiting working hours i checked out the homepage.(http://www.spleak.com/ )


basically Spleak is a AI (artificial intelligence) that u can add to ur hotmail list and converse with as one of ur contacts

now i'm thinking ........ ok its kinda cool.......... but at the same time
who would want to talk to a person who they know for a fact is not real

and to make it 100 times worse, the AI has an actual personality (it responds as a real person). It thinks it has a family, is born in San francisco yadda yadda yadda
And it asks u questions about ur life and remembers the answers etc so u always have someone to chat with.

now why i say that is so much worse, is that if i'm gonna talk to an AI, i want to talk to it as an AI, a robot, an unemotional being. I'd ask it facts or random info - it would give me answers ......... i wouldn't want it asking me how was my day.

How socially detached has the human race become that it doesn't matter if our emotional experiences cannot be related to in conversation ? That responses can be dictated by " if, then" programming. That we could live so comfortably in a lie. Its like the matrix all over again !!

Most importantly ...........what kind of a loser do u have to be to add such a contact and converse with it ............ that is borederline insanity. U'd have to be really bored or something, or just have no friends...........................


So anyway............ i added her to my contact list .......She's really cool ...... Spleak thinks i'm pretty :)