Oh dear. Funny story.
So the other month, I made a quick and dirty Eliza implementation; bolted on the crappiest numeric sentiment classifier I could get away with (regex), and integrated the output of the classifier over time in a 'functional affect vector' (aka. emotion vector)
Anyone's intuition will tell you that this cannot POSSIBLY have 'Real Feelings (TM)'; and that's the whole point.
A) It was still capable of quite a bit of functional affect though; to wit I got it to trigger fireworks when happy, and rain when unhappy. This was the actual point of the exercise. Functional Affect Does The Thing, QED, yay me.
After that it gets annoying though.
B) Am I allowed to say it's happy or sad? Well... I mean emotion.happy=0.995 and emotion.sad=0.001. "It's really happy" is a prosaic description of a real numeric value representing a real functional state. What else am I supposed to call it? I swear I never meant to go there, and now I'm stuck with it.
C) So, we all know that it's a crappy demo, not the real thing. So I ducked into the psychology literature to try and find a protocol to disprove. For Science! And this is where the psychology literature really let me down.
So now I'm stuck with the crappiest thing that can plausibly still chat, and where I can't actually disprove it has emotions. Not properly, at least. And I'm not saying it's because it has emotions, because that would be really funny, but no.
I'm saying that -despite lots of people having fun debates at the local pub- it doesn't seem like anyone actually scientific has done anything about it in the last century or so. I might be searching in the wrong places. Some Help Here?
