While perusing the Second Life Marketplace for chatbots, I noticed that two versions of Eliza were being sold, and one version of iGod.  Anyone familiar with chatbots knows the historical significance of Eliza and there exists a version or two of iGod at Pandorabots.

And, it made me wonder, with the air of permissiveness with regard to secretly “enlisting” other people’s chatbots for various apps and scripts, and the ease with which it can be accomplished, is there anything preventing an enterprising developer from “acquiring” the link to a publicly available bot, yours or mine, and selling it at Second Life?

I think it comes down to suing them for copyright infringement and intellectual property theft but I am by no means an expert on the law.  I guess if you found someone in SL doing this then you would have to do what you did with Nathan and ask them to remove your bot and see how that goes.

It is fine with me if somebody “soups up” my True AI chatbot

http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/AiMind.html

and “sells” it at Second Life. Although it is hard to code the JavaScript artificial intelligence (JSAI), a market may exist for loading the AI Mind up with special knowledge bases—sort of like gift books specially printed for children with details pertaining to the child receiving the book as a gift.

The JSAI has been growing in “smarts” and in functionality by leaps and bounds, mainly by adding new code imported from the http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/mindforth.txt MindForth AI. Most recently (yesterday) the JSAI was outfitted with the remarkable new ability to “comprehend” simple English sentences by waiting, after a noun comes in, for a taggable verb to come in, and then for a taggable noun to come in as the direct object of the verb. But when I type in, “you are not a bad guy.” the JSAI answers now, “I AM NOT A GUY”, as if the negation of “bad” totally negates “guy”. Anyway, like the fellow who wrote “Steal This Book”, I plead, “Steal This AI”.

Roger Davie - Oct 5, 2011:

I think it comes down to suing them for copyright infringement and intellectual property theft but I am by no means an expert on the law.  I guess if you found someone in SL doing this then you would have to do what you did with Nathan and ask them to remove your bot and see how that goes.

Suing people at this level wouldn’t be worth it unless you were rich and doing it out of principel.  Going off on your own, engaging these schermishes, is exhausting and it robs you of productive time, not to mention, your spirit.  It’s not much fun arguing with people convinced it’s their God-given right to take your stuff simply because they know that you can’t do anything about it.  It makes you want give up and find something else to do with your time.

Arthur T Murray - Oct 5, 2011:

It is fine with me if somebody “soups up” my True AI chatbot… like the fellow who wrote “Steal This Book”, I plead, “Steal This AI”.

I frequently communicate with people who say their bot doesn’t get anyone chatting with it, and they are willing to allow their bot to be carted off in bondage and servitude just so it might receive some traffic.  Upon closer inspection, it usually turns out that they’re doing nothing to promote their work, and they’re simply waiting for people to find their bot using Google, or something.

Having a chatbot (like any product or service) consists creating and improving the bot, and then, letting others know it exists and is available.  I promote my bots extensively, so much so that keeping up with the chatlogs is often difficult… and I do it all for free.