Evangelist Bots

[Laudate_Dominum]

So my plan has for some time been to perfect bots that are capable of evangelizing over the internet. The goal is to have a Catholic apologist bot on every forum on the internet. The impact of this could be staggering.

These bots use open source AI coupled with the modules that I've been inventing. One aspect is obviously that which enables the bot to actually interact via standard forum systems. The other is that which allows it to discern anti-Catholic statements and questions about Catholicism, which leads to the final module, that which creates a response based on a catalog of canned answers and searching for relevant links within domains that are known to be solid (ie., EWTN library, Catholic.com, etc..).

So, the obvious objection is that they are not real people so it's weird, or that it's trolling. Both of these have some validity, but I think it’s debatable.

What are your opinions?

[CatholicCid]

So it could either answer your question or direct you to the answer?
If so, I'd go for that.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='CatholicCid' date='Jan 2 2006, 02:47 PM']So it could either answer your question or direct you to the answer?
If so, I'd go for that.
[right][snapback]843580[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]
That's the plan.. But I have a long way to go.. I don't have time to make it all work because I need to make a living.. If only I could get funding.. A grant or something.. But this kind of bot would be abused by advertising campaigns and every class of troll.

hmm.. maybe I could get rich..

j/k

[philothea]

I voted "Doesn't sound right to me" but upon further reflection, I should have voted "No way! That's terrible."

If you could get it to work as you describe it'd be an [i]awful[/i] PR move. The Church will give the impression of being thoughtless, mechanical, impersonal, and rude. You'd do better harvesting email addresses and spamming them with Catholic tracts -- that would be less irritating.

Any forum full of actual humans who want to interact will wind up banning bots anyway.

It might be helpful to make an automated Catholic question-based reference system, where people could go to ask questions. (Even this is not a trivial proposition. Ask Jeeves was fairly lame.) Please don't hound people in their own discussion groups and spam canned answers at them.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='philothea' date='Jan 2 2006, 04:06 PM']I voted "Doesn't sound right to me" but upon further reflection, I should have voted "No way! That's terrible."

If you could get it to work as you describe it'd be an [i]awful[/i] PR move.  The Church will give the impression of being thoughtless, mechanical, impersonal, and rude.  You'd do better harvesting email addresses and spamming them with Catholic tracts -- that would be less irritating. 

Any forum full of actual humans who want to interact will wind up banning bots anyway.

It might be helpful to make an automated Catholic question-based reference system, where people could go to ask questions.  (Even this is not a trivial proposition.  Ask Jeeves was fairly lame.)  Please don't hound people in their own discussion groups and spam canned answers at them.
[right][snapback]843648[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]
Yeah, that's why it would only be worthy of deployment if it was capable of passing as just a guy who pops in from time to time and posts really useful little comments and links. The bots would avoid discussions and just appear to be lurkers who pop in and out from time to time. Ideally, no one would suspect that they were bots, and it wouldn't matter, because there are plenty of "human" posts that are nothing more than links and/or blurbs, and if its not excessive, no one thinks its thoughtless, rude and irritating. In fact, it seems that a couple of DingoBot's posts in the debate table were very useful and appreciated.

Your remarks are precisely the presupposition that I seek to overcome. I measure my success by the degree to which your fears are rendered obsolete.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

To an extent, it might be good...but evangelization necessitates that a [b]person[/b] establish a relationship to draw another into communion with Christ.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Raphael' date='Jan 2 2006, 04:26 PM']To an extent, it might be good...but evangelization necessitates that a [b]person[/b] establish a relationship to draw another into communion with Christ.
[right][snapback]843666[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]
insofar as the articles and other resources originate in human activities this is in fact the case. I don't see it as all that different from a scenario in which a guy chooses to surf the net and (only) post relevant links in response to anti-Catholic claims. This happens constantly on Catholic boards. The nice thing about the bots is that boards without any authentic Catholic presence will have a little something at least. And the bots would be programmed to post as little as possible.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' date='Jan 2 2006, 05:33 PM']insofar as the articles and other resources originate in human activities this is in fact the case. I don't see it as all that different from a scenario in which a guy chooses to surf the net and (only) post relevant links in response to anti-Catholic claims. This happens constantly on Catholic boards. The nice thing about the bots is that boards without any authentic Catholic presence will have a little something at least. And the bots would be programmed to post as little as possible.
[right][snapback]843676[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]
Then it couldn't properly be called evangelism. It may be semantics, but we need to be clear.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Raphael' date='Jan 2 2006, 04:34 PM']Then it couldn't properly be called evangelism.  It may be semantics, but we need to be clear.
[right][snapback]843678[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]
sure they can, at the very least in a metaphorical sense.

[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

This might take some serious programming,
I think a better idea would be a bot directing people to where they can talk to real people.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='thedude' date='Jan 2 2006, 04:55 PM']This might take some serious programming,
I think a better idea would be a bot directing people to where they can talk to real people.
[right][snapback]843702[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]
I know, but I've got the good bulk of it covered.

[Socrates]

I voted "doesn't seem right to me."
Like that Dingobot character, bots tend to be humorous and amusing entertainment at best, annoying and obnoxious pests at worst.

Providing a list of links to useful sites seems to probably be the only useful function of this bot, and this could be done by a knowledgable person. (Seems the bot would basically be a "labor-saving device" for those who don't have time to do the evangelical posting themselves.)

However, as soon as anybody tried to engage the bot in a debate, it would be found out quickly.

(And on debate phorums, human posters who simply post links only accomplish so much.)

There is much in debating and evanglization that can only be accomplished by a human being, time-consuming and laborous though it may be.

And I think the bot whould tend to engender ill will towards its creators/users, much as with spam.
Just think, what would be your likely reaction if a "MormonBot," "BaptistBot" or "AtheistBot" were unleashed on Phatmass?

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Socrates' date='Jan 2 2006, 05:43 PM']Just think, what would be your likely reaction if a "MormonBot," "BaptistBot" or "AtheistBot" were unleashed on Phatmass?
[right][snapback]843731[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]


don't give me any ideas.

[Anastasia13]

Bots can't think or react to people the way that other people can. I think that will be a major inhibiting factor. Also, as I doubt the forum owners would like that and it would involve a bit of deception. Rather than spending your time perfecting the bots, why not do that yourself, and teach others how*? That seems far more doable to me and less deceptive. What kind of religion after all requires bots to do it's evangelism for the people?

*You could write lead an online evangelism class to get people started? What about that? They could be trained in the interpersonal sensitivity and intellectual knowledge of evangelism. You could have almost a pyramid effect then although the wide edge might be a bit more jagged.

[Laudate_Dominum]

Perhaps I could start a message board site which will be home to the bots (rather than sending them forth to all corners of the internet). It would be kind of a novelty. Various bots with various fields of expertise that you could dialogue with. That way people would know they were dealing with bots and it would be kind of fun.
Gosh, it would take a lot of work to make that happen.. and money. It'll never happen.

But the fact is, I know I could make bots better then what I've seen so far. It seems like it would be a waste to simply discard the bot project. Someone mentioned Jeeves.. My bots would be way better than Jeeves.. I actually started working on something like Jeeves around 1998, I had bots crawling the internet 24/7 but after only a week I had maxed out the hardware, and the limitations of the database system I was using (SQL Server based).
The nice thing about my more recent approach is that it doesn't do any crawling, but simply interfaces with google and other engines. They do the real work when it comes to locating resources, my system just filters and processes what the big dogs provide. And the AI for my bots also stands on the shoulders of giants.. But to make it the way I would like will still require a great deal of development time.