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in the form of a video primer that recaps their love. He must fight his way out of fungibility every morning.
Statefulness
    A look at the “home turf” of many chatbots shows a conscious effort on the part of the programmers to make Drew Barrymores of us: worse, actually, because it was her
long
-term memory that kept wiping clean. At 2008 Loebner Prize winner Elbot’s website, the screen refreshes each time a new remark is entered, so the conversational history evaporates with each sentence; ditto at the page of 2007 winner Ultra Hal. At the Cleverbot site, the conversation fades to white above the box where text is entered, preserving only the last three exchanges on the screen, with the history beyond that gone: out of sight, and hopefully—it would seem—out of the user’s mind as well. The elimination of the long-term influence of conversational history makes the bots’ jobs easier—in terms of both the psychology and the mathematics.
    In many cases, though, physically eliminating the conversation log is unnecessary. As three-time Loebner Prize winner (’00, ’01, and ’04), programmer Richard Wallace explains, “Experience with [Wallace’s chatbot] A.L.I.C.E. indicates that most casual conversation is ‘state-less,’ that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history of the conversation required to formulate the reply.”
    Not all types of human conversations function in this way, but many do, and it behooves AI researchers to determine which types of conversations are “stateless”—that is, with each remark depending only on the last—and to attempt to create these very sorts of interactions. It’s our job as confederates, as humans, to resist it.
    One of the classic stateless conversation types, it turns out, is verbal abuse.
    In 1989, twenty-old University College Dublin undergraduate Mark Humphrys connects a chatbot program he’d written called MGonz to his university’s computer network and leaves the building for the day. A user (screen name “SOMEONE”) from Drake University in Iowa tentatively sends the message “finger” to Humphrys’s account—an early-Internet command that acts as a request for basic information about a user. To SOMEONE’s surprise, a response comes back immediately: “cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences.” This begins an argument between SOMEONE and MGonz that will last almost an hour and a half.
    (The best part is undoubtedly when SOMEONE says, a mere twenty minutes in, “you sound like a goddamn robot that repeats everything.”)
    Returning to the lab the next morning, Humphrys is stunned to find the logs, and feels a strange, ambivalent emotion. His program might have just passed the Turing test, he thinks—but the evidence is so profane that he’s afraid to publish it.
    Humphrys’s twist on the age-old chatbot paradigm of the “non-directive” conversationalist who lets the user do all the talking was to model his program, rather than on an attentive listener, on an abusive jerk. When it lacks any clear cue for what to say, MGonz falls back not on therapy clichés like “How does that make you feel?” or “Tell me more about that” but on things like “you are obviously an asshole,” “ok thats it im not talking to you any more,” or “ah type something interesting or shut up.” It’s a stroke of genius, because, as becomes painfully clear from reading the MGonz transcripts,
argument is stateless
.
    I’ve seen it happen between friends: “Once again, you’ve neglected to do what you’ve promised.” “Oh, there you go right in with that tone of yours!” “Great, let’s just dodge the issue and talk about my tone instead! You’re so defensive!” “
You’re
the one being defensive! This is just like the time you
x
!” “For the millionth time, I did noteven remotely
x
!
You’re
the one who …” And on and on. A close reading of this dialogue, with MGonz in mind, turns up