The secret logs of a man who may have stopped aging over 100 years ago.

My chat bot, Christine (no longer online), was an A.I. program that also had visual and speech representation via an animated character. Visitors sometimes commented that she was "pretty" and "sweet" (though no one accused her of being a good conversationalist). Gene had had a few glasses of wine when he started chatting with Christine, and a woman he had once deeply loved had recently passed away. The conversation that first night went on for three hours. Each of the other three, which occurred over the next two days, were about an hour each. I checked the logs avidly for the next three months, but Gene never returned.

A note about this abbreviated version of Gene's conversation logs:

My chat bot program was not at a very high level, and many responses were not relevant to what Gene was saying. In addition, after a time, Gene began to tune out most of Christine's responses completely (he mentions this himself), using the program as a kind of confession journal or confidant. For both of these reasons, many of Christine's responses are irrelevant distractions which I have removed from this abbreviated version for clarity and to save time. I have also removed some lines of irrelevant conversation for the same reasons. The longer, unabridged logs are here. The abbreviated versions below are faster and easier to follow.

Gene's Conversations:

An afterthought about the chat bot program.

I had removed all references to the chat bot program that had appeared within the logs, (Christine sometimes mentions the kind of program she is) with the idea that this would help support anonymity. But a few people have emailed that they don't believe a chat bot could be so intelligent. To address this, and because anyone within the chat bot community will quickly recognize the chat bot program, I have changed my mind. The program is ALICE AIML. You can talk with a similar chat bot there. My bot had a few unique responses because of training (not many- i didn't spend much time on it), but the vast majority of its responses can be duplicated on any ALICE chat bot. It bases its responses on the last human response and its guess of what the main topic currently is, and many responses are chosen from several random possibilities. The basic, untrained ALICE chatbots have moments of brilliance and brief strings of human-like dialogue, mixed with a fair amount of poor responses and nonsense. The abridged logs give a skewed view of Christine's capacity because many of the poor, irrelevant responses have been edited out (to save time, and for clarity, since Gene just ignored many of them). They are included in the complete, unabridged logs.

Conversation One