Joe Martin at bit-tech.net picked up an article on Gizmodo talking about the coming invasion of Army Artificial Intelligences masquerading as real players in World of Warcraft. According to Dr. John Parmentola, the plan is to test the AI's ability to be a %26quot;fake%26quot; human by letting it interact with real humans in a virtual world.
My first reaction was, %26quot;Whoah, cool. All your base are belong to us.%26quot; But after a moment's thought, this might not actually be such a great idea. Given the communication skills of some players (especially in the battlegrounds), I'm not seeing this as a litmus test of what in-game speech can pass for spoken by real people. While I'm pretty sure the AI won't communicate like a roleplayer, the AI could probably get by with a series of %26quot;lol%26quot; and %26quot;kek%26quot; typed out in rapid succession.
This isn't the first time we've heard about the military using WoW (or WoW-like systems) for training purposes, which is the nominal purpose of this new AI research. Maybe it won't be too long before we're logging in to have a Gnome Rogue named Joshua quietly whisper us, %26quot;Shall we play a game?%26quot;