As I’d mentioned on some recent posts, a lot of people seem to like the idea of artificial intelligence on the dark web – albeit of the mythological variety.

So far, the only chatbots that I know of on the dark web are Ned (on not Evil) and a few on MadIRC. Ned, as I’d said before, is very similar to ALICE, who is considered to be one of the better chatbots in existence.

Why should there only be one chatbot, though? (Well, there might be others, but I have yet to come across them.)

Were there to be a perfect chatbot for the dark web, I think it should combine aspects of creepiness and intelligence. For instance, it should learn from other users, and should also have practical functions. A good example of a “practical” bot would be the one on Hacker Combat, which answers user queries and can hold simple conversations.

Now, I don’t know a whole lot about this bot’s source code or whether or not it learns, but it seems to be helpful at navigating the site if nothing else.

As for features that would make a bot “creepy,” perhaps if the bot remembered information about visitors, or could simply approach them in a creepy way (kind of like a guy making unwanted advances). In fact, I found the perfect bot that could be a model for this: d.Bot – it does exactly what I said.

Of course, knowing that it’s a bot helps make it a bit less offensive. I thought it was interesting that the bot assumed you were female! I recommend you try it out; just don’t take anything it says personally.

In the course of writing this post, I went in search of “creepy chatbots,” and was more than a little disturbed by some of the things I found (as if d.Bot weren’t creepy enough). For instance, have you read the article “Don’t Send Your Selfies to This Creepy Chatbot for Teens” on VICE Motherboard?

The article, which talks about the Hugging Face app, points out that the bot insists on getting a selfie from you. In fact, if you try to trick it and send a different picture, it will keep goading you about it. Freaky, no?

To test this out, I started chatting with one of the bots that the developers made, called “Jade Huggin.” The first thing I noticed is that it chats at you very quickly. It also immediately learns your name (which it gets from your Facebook profile).

At first glance, it seems harmless, but it appeared to want to know more and more personal information about me. Perfect for a creepy bot, right? If Jade were on the dark web, though, I would be far more suspicious of her motives.

It’s interesting to note that the same developers have a deep learning chatbot that uses Neuralconvo, which implements neural networks (kind of like Google Translate). Try it out and see what it comes up with: Neuralconvo – Chat with a Deep learning brain.

On my first A.I. post, I’d mentioned a bot that used to be at chat-bot.com; the thing that creeped me out about that particular bot was that it seemed to know information about me that I’d never told it! Thus far, Jade is the closest thing to that bot in terms of freakiness – although the previous bot not only spoke English but any language I typed in (including Thai, Vietnamese, and German).

Rebot.me has an option to create and customize your own chatbot if you want to experiment with this. Like any program, though, it will require a lot of work to actually seem intelligent. On that site, you can add numerous questions and responses to your bot – it’s a good experience for tweaking (not that kind of tweaking!).

Anyhow, who wants to help me with this? I look forward to having an awesome dark web bot!

Hopefully she’s just as creepy as Jade and d.Bot.