Living Bots: Chatting, Dancing, Soccer-Playing AIs

I think the recent imbroglio over the use of bots isn't over the presence of artificial Residents per se, just their employment for the singular purpose of boosting a landowner's Traffic stats. 

Why do I say that?  Consider Actorbots.  As the name suggests, these are bots with enough rudimentary AI and scripting to chat, kick a soccer ball around, even dance.  Osprey Therian recently took a look at them for SL Games, including this one at the right, an AI with a suspicious resemblance to a certain cult graphic novel hero, twirling a hot blonde on the dance floor.  Osprey came away impressed, especially as the Actorbots, from a company called SineWave, are still in development.

So what if a landowner used them at her nightclub to dance with visiting Residents, hold rudimentary conversations with them, even get romantic?  Would it still seem like cheating if her place garnered high Traffic?

Comments

[Nyoko Salome]

gee, so -that's- why it was so crowded there last night... i went to perchance catch up on the newest half of their dances; i left when i found their dancepads so filled up that as soon as i stopped dancing, a bot would jump right in as if i wasn't there.

i left without trying anything more... :\

bad idea, sine - but i love your dances. i suggest that you reduce your experiment to make room for your -real- customers!! :)

[Adz Childs]

There is currently no way to "opt-out" of the traffic counts. There is no way for me to make the SLNameWatch bot honest with respect to traffic calculations.

The SLNameWatch bot self-identifies as such in its login handshake with LL. Nevertheless, the parcel I use as her home (I own it), gets an artificial traffic boost of about 400 points, whatever that means. This parcel that is otherwise a non-commercial private residence. I am not interested in traffic. I made a 16 m2 parcel for the bot to live on, but guess what? As far as I can tell traffic figures do not depend on parcel size. So I wound up with a 16m2 parcel with 400+ traffic.

This dance bot can self-identify as a bot as well. I can't verify that it does, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. There is a field in the libsecondlife call, client.Network.Login, where you can specify your application name or client version, and author's email address. I see no reason to lie.

One solution is for LL to write code that looks at the client version field of the login message, and they can at least remove the self-identified bots from the traffic calculations.

[Luce Imaginary]

Excellent idea. I look forward to more of this as the AI get's mroe sophisticated.

[Easy Babcock]

Actually we have not put any bots on Sine Wave Island - I think it was just packed with customers when you went there Nyoko!

We have been pushing LL for some time to give bots yellow dots on the map and to give them a different coloured hovering text, to make them transparent. All our bots are hard wired so that if you ask 'Are you a bot?' they confirm that they are and give the name of the avatar responsible for them. Our bots can also only be spawned on land where the bot owner has build permissions. We're trying to make bots a visible, useful asset on the grid, not a hidden thing that coders to in the background :)

[Osprey Therian]

I think that Sine Wave is doing bots in a thoughtful and ethical way - and a creative way, too. I'm not a lover of the concept so I will never be enthusiastic about bots, however I AM enthusiastic about Sine Wave.

[Nyoko Salome]

:)) okay easy - i'll take your word for it! :) certainly your work is extra-popular and for all good reasons... but wow, then the peeps there sure are a lot more 'pushy', like i've never seen before. maybe there's nothing to do about that, but it doesn't make for a pleasant visit. i even revisited to try again and experienced the same thing... as soon as i would unsit a trial dance, someone else would just shove right in, not even concious of my proximity, it seemed. :\ like i say, maybe nothing able to be done about that!